Sketches CD | Frank Wallace, guitarist/composer

The Gosman Review of Sketches says: “Although Frank Wallace’s CD, Sketches, (Gyre Music) is a collection of pieces for solo guitar, there is an unmistakable vocal quality to the compositions and performance. Wallace’s skillful use of dynamics and tempo variations conjure images of timeless dancers stepping to the ever-changing musical flow of the natural world.”

Program Notes from CD
Sketches is a collection of miniatures written spontaneously over the past eight years. They are tone poems, short and direct. They are ethnic and simple, influenced by ouds and gypsy fiddles, medieval chants and renaissance fools, sacred motets and ancient guitarists. They come from my soul, not my head. They are a meditation, an album for the young.

Nuevas Cantigas is inspired by the 13th century Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X, el Sabio, of Spain. Preserved in four large books of incomparable beauty, this collection includes over four hundred monophonic songs and many color miniatures laid out like cartoons that tell tales and sing the praises of Holy Mary. Five of my cantigas are original compositions while the second, Imperayritz, from the 14th century Llibre Vermell, has only a few notes added to the original two-part piece. In Santa Maria Valed I have added a simple drone to a tune from the original Cantigas. In this poignant song the great king himself prays to Holy Mary to relieve him of a terrible illness.

The great masters of polyphonic masses and motets such as Josquin des Près inspired lutenists from Capirola to Dowland for over a century. My Five Polyphonic Fantasies start with the vocal clarity of their renaissance models and move toward a more ?guitaristic? expression in Fantasies IV and V. Inversions , my first solo guitar compositions, were written in 1977, twenty years before I began sharing my works with the world. The second Inversion inspired the piece In the Shadow of the Church from my first Gyre CD, Frank Wallace, his own new works.

Harlequin is the wise fool of commedia dell? arte, one of the earliest forms of slapstick comedy, still influential to this day. With its roots in masked comedy of ancient times, it spread from Italy to other parts of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. In this tradition, stock characters improvise to a loose story line. Here, Harlequin falls in love with a beautiful young forbidden woman, gets into trouble, and must flee. On the Sol, in Mi is a pun (Harlequin does have a pure heart): the melody of this song in E Major is played primarily on the third, or G [sol], string. I wrote Six Prayers on Six Strings because the most beautiful manner of playing a melody on a stringed instrument is to slide up and down one string. The melody is played almost exclusively on one string – all accompaniment figures are conceived around this limitation.

The final piece is a set of variations based on a “fake” theme in the style of Dionisio Aguado (1784-1849) which I wrote for a young student of mine. The name comes from the finale, in which, in my imagination, Dionisio visits Buenos Aires (Good Winds), whereupon he hears some good tangos.

Frank Wallace