The Great Deep CD | Duo LiveOak performs songs of Frank A. Wallace

Duo LiveOak is grateful to all 58 backers (plus 4 others!) who supported The Great Deep CD Project on Kickstarter.com! Our first Duo recording in 6 years features these 8 songs and is all about rites of passage: end of the old year, beginning of the new, wild passion of youth on the verge, wonderings of great old age.

PROGRAM NOTES
The Great Deep is eight songs pondering life’s greatest mystery, for high voice with lush accompaniments on 10-string guitar. I chose the well-known poems by Turner, Donne, Pope, Shelley, Rossetti, Shakespeare, and Tennyson in honor of our parents. (Three of them were well into their 90’s when I wrote the piece in 2008.) The poems reflect on the transition from this life to the unimaginable beyond. Merlin’s riddle from Tennyson’s The Coming of Arthur is really the theme song of the entire CD, covering in a few lines the passage from youth to adulthood, from middle age to old age (What, after all, is Truth?) and from old age back to the great deep:

Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow in the sky!
A young man will be wiser by and by;
An old man’s wit may wander ere he die.
Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow on the lea!
And truth is this to me, and that to thee;
And truth or clothed or naked let it be.
Rain, sun, and rain! and the free blossom blows:
Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows?
From the great deep to the great deep he goes.

House of Bernarda Alba
I wrote Ovejita and Paca la Roseta as part of a group of pieces Emerson College commissioned for performances of the Lorca play La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba) in April of 2010, –Sunil Swaroop, director and Zac Baker-Salmon, assistant director. It was my first music for a staged production. Duo LiveOak debuted the full versions of both pieces at the 2010 St. Joseph Guitar Festival in St. Joseph, Missouri. Ovejita, “little lamb,” is the only actual song from the play, sung by grandmother Maria Josefa who is locked up by her daughter for her “madness”, but truly she is the wise fool in Lorca’s conception. She describes a hut of coral on the beach where she and the lamb she carries will find peace. It is not unlike the visions of the beyond of the dying. Her dreamy ramblings are interrupted by angry taunting calls to her daughter and granddaughter. Paca la Roseta is an incidental character in the play, a lascivious young woman who is carried off (“held like a guitar”) on horseback, willing and bare-breasted, by the virile young men of the town…a stark contrast to the lives of Bernarda’s five adult daughters, cloistered by their overbearing mother.

Mi Jardín de Calla is a solo song for voice and guitar that I wrote for David Newsam, then director of the Boston Classical Guitar Society, to be performed in the spring of 2007 in an evening of “The Music of Frank Wallace”. As concert plans progressed, we took the opportunity to score the piece for all twelve performers, including many guitars, cello, flute, and two singers. My partner Nancy Knowles wrote the poem in Spanish when we were on tour in Peru in the summer of 2005. The poem reflects on the layering of civilizations, describing a tiny garden full of white calla lilies hidden in the bustling center of old colonial Arequipa, where the gentle breezes easily whisper through the open porticoes and salons. The syncopated bass line contrasts a sense of “street music” with the parallel fifths of ancient church music.

Speak Love
This song-cycle was conceived at an overnight stay at guitar scholar Thomas Heck’s home in Santa Barbara in March, 2005. Speak Love is set to hauntingly beautiful love poems by Henriette de Saussure Blanding, Anne Heck’s grandmother, written in one year, 1909-1910, when she was eighteen. I composed the first five songs within two weeks and debuted the cycle a month later while on tour in Germany. Two songs were added in the fall of 2005. I dedicated it to various couples of the American guitar world including the Hecks, the Longs and the Danners.

The Chimes
After completing the Great Deep in 2008, I was looking for something else to write for my new ten-string guitar by Stephan Connor. Just after Christmas Nancy found an old copy of “Christmas Stories” (including the story The Chimes) by Dickens sitting on a shelf at my in-laws’ house. I frequently have a creative rush at the end of the year – free time and a beautiful place to hole up for a couple of weeks. I set to work, and met my goal of finishing the piece on the afternoon of December 31. Dickens’ words sum up the spirit of the CD: The year was Old, that day. The patient Year had lived through the reproaches and misuses of its slanderers and faithfully performed its work… I see the Spirit of the Chimes among you! I know there is a sea of Time to rise one day, before which all who wrong us will be swept away like leaves. I see it, on the flow! …I know that we must trust and hope, and neither doubt ourselves, nor doubt the good in one another… ’O Spirits, merciful and good, I am grateful!’