Cyrcles, Sonata #3 | for guitar by Frank A. Wallace
by Frank A. Wallace
for classical guitar solo, op. 94
SUGGESTED DONATION: $15.00
Duration: 20 minutes; 12 pages
Difficulty level: Concert music
Written: December 2017
Commissioned by: David William Ross
Recording: David Ross 2019 for Ravello Records: Amor Fati
All Gyre compositions are ASCAP
Copyright ©2018 Frank A. Wallace
Cover photography and design by Nancy Knowles
All rights reserved.
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Sonata #3 commission
Cyrcles is my Sonata #3 for solo classical guitar, op. 94, commissioned by David William Ross in the fall of 2017 and completed in January, 2018. The piece was written to be part of David’s new album of music inspired by the seasons, thus the movements are:
I. Solstice I
II. The light
III. Darkness falling
IV. Solstice II
V. The great sleep – Ko’s way
VI. First truth
Other music on the CD will include works by Takemitsu, Sergio Assad, and others.
David Ross Notes from the CD
Cyrcles is cyclical in form, motivic ideas and melodic fragments recur from movement to movement. These motifs carry the names of people the composer had in mind while writing, their names translated into musical notes, including close friends, a doctor and my own name. But, the dominant theme is that of Ko, one of the composer’s students, the son of dear friends, lost to suicide at the age of 22. Ko’s motif translates to 5 musical steps, chromatic or diatonic depending on the musical context. The Great Sleep – Ko’s Way is a striking movement, in memoriam, relentlessly quiet and still, offering a moment of meditation on death, loss, and grief. The movement employs traditional musical motifs but is truly personal from the heart of the composer.
But in spite of the pain inherent in the cycles of nature, the composer iterates the positive message of his piece saying “Cyrcles is optimistic. It embraces the sacred cycle of life and death. And it mourns the loss of youth. My youth, as a 66 year old man, but more importantly OUR youth. Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death in the world for those aged 15-24 years*. Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Drug overdose also claims many lives of our youth. The circle is broken. Let’s wake up and be gentle with each other and our mother the Earth. Only in that gentleness is there hope to reclaim optimism and dreams of a brighter future for all species.” *[according to Suicide Statistics and Facts – SAVE]
A hard fall
The fall of 2017 was a tough one for me. I discovered that I had ocular melanoma and I lost a former and dear student to suicide at age 22. So the inspiration to contemplate the Seasons in itself was a balm to my soul. Ko, my deceased student, also became central to the music. I often derive musical themes from names. In this case I used several of my doctors’ names (one oddly including ‘ko’- Dr. Tyszko), David’s, and Ko and his parents, who are close friends. Ko became the dominant idea in its utter simplicity, two letters translating musically to either five 1/2 steps or five diatonic steps – a major third and a perfect fifth.
I believe the titles of each movement are self-explanatory except the last. It is a bit of word play on the Spanish word for spring, primavera – from the Latin for first spring. Los veras is a way of saying truth in Spanish and so I take a bit of liberty in my translation – First truth. Poetic license to infer the deep truth of birth, renewal and faith that the circle will complete itself and return to the beginning – every year! It is a very brief musical reference to one of my early concert performance pieces La Primavera by Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco. It is a part of his series of musical settings of Platero y Yo, the Nobel prize-winning poems of Juan Ramon Jimenez.