Duo LiveOak Interview with Betsy Small
Lute Society of America Quarterly Fall 2003

Betsy Small: I would have enjoyed chatting with you in person, but with the distance between Washington DC and New Hampshire, our friendly electronic Instant Messenger will have to do as a courier!

Frank Wallace: Yes, well, our kids love communicating with IM, so let's see if it works for an interview...

BS: Since the theme of this Quarterly is the lute song, there's a lot of ground we could cover. You've been an evolving lute, vihuela and guitar song team for so many years, both as performers and creators, exploring Renaissance, Romantic and new songs. What aspect of song have you been working on most lately?

FW: Most definitely creating new ones.

BS: What have you been working on?

FW: Aside from my guitar songs and solos, I have written 3 sets of new lute songs so far -- one for me alone, one for Nancy and one for both of us: Voices in the Dark, Woman of the Water and Pearly Everlasting. I've used my beautiful 10 course Van Lennep lute for each, though Voices is just for 7 course. The first of these song cycles was Voices, which was inspired by a workshop we gave here in Antrim at our home, a 1789 farmhouse in the country. We have done workshops at our house for years. Each voice student was to write a poem a day for five days. Nancy's idea was to get everyone more involved in his or her word expression. It was very successful, and so she compiled a small book of these poems afterwards .

BS: How did you encourage the participants to let go of their inhibitions about creating poetry?

Nancy Knowles: There was a lot of initial resistance to the idea of writing poems, but once started they couldn't stop, and that is the material Frank used for Voices in the Dark. The song Maryanne is funny, as it was written by a sixty year old guy who was sleeping in a loft above several forty-ish women, and it is about the racy dreams he had, as they listened to his snoring...

BS: Ah, now I understand that text – the song is hilarious.

FW: Pearly Everlasting, for two voices and lute, was written as we were mourning the death of our colleague Jon Fleagle, who founded LiveOak with us.

BS: It's a very moving piece. I remember John Fleagle, a good guy, and a wonderful singer. It must have been so hard to lose him.

FW: Indeed - very strange for many people who knew him - he was so young…So you can see these songs came out of our experiences, much as it must have been for Dowland or, of course, anyone from any era. I'm not trying to recreate anything, just continue a tradition. It was easier for me to write lute songs (before guitar songs) because of my extensive experience both performing and intabulating 16th century songs.

BS: You continue that tradition not only by writing from experience, but also by keeping much of the writing idiomatic to the lute as it was in its heyday. …I see a lot of traces of early Spanish vihuela music in your songs.

FW: You can see the first song of Voices, in particular, is very Narvaez-like. Doing intabulations, such as the ones in my two books of intabulations, The Art of Flemish Song and Cancionero Nuevo, a new harvest of old Spanish songs (Gyre Publications, www.gyremusic.com) taught me how to compose - I have no other formal training … The second piece of Voices in the Dark starts out with a re-voicing of the imitative theme of the first - my effort to make it more "modern". After that I just let it go and they flowed out very easily.

BS: What other music in your life has influenced your composition style?

FW: Part of my purpose in writing is to create larger forms than exist for small ensembles in the Renaissance. Hence I think like a Romantic in terms of a song cycle format. In Pearly Everlasting there are traces of some French 17th century lute style - big C minor chords, to take advantage of the range and depth of the 10-course … And then came Woman of the Water. Nancy still wasn't satisfied that she had a BIG piece, so she conceived of this cycle as a love story, selecting Roethke poems.

BS: Did Roethke group them together?

FW: The first few are his grouping but then Nancy searched for more to fill it out. We really struggled over the succession and meaning of the poems well before I started writing. It is a 20-minute piece with a very strong form and arch to the structure.

BS: In what sense?

FW: It starts with a very medieval style chord progression and uses many Renaissance ideas, but has a modern feel both in the story and structure. What I mean is - we started with the idea of telling a story. The purpose of the music is simply to underscore that larger idea - like an opera. Woman was a way of accomplishing that. Nancy has a great yearning to be dramatic and yet we love our small-scale approach and don't really care for large ensembles.

BS: It seems to return to a very simple style in the last song, Meditation. Is this part of the intended form?

FW: The Moment is certainly the climax, and the slow repeated bass notes, after so much yearning, as well as the large leaps and striking harmonies of My Wrath bring the piece to a new place. The last two pieces are a settling down.

NK: I'm joined by a willing partner when it comes to drama-- all Frank's composing is dramatic in nature. You should have seen Frank as the fool in our production of The Lost Spindle, which was a show we toured in the late eighties and early nineties that was based on commedia dell arte—a fully staged three person "opera" using songs from the Spanish 16th Cancionero to tell the story. The story came from the texts of the songs. Juan del Encina wrote a number of commedia-esque entertainments called eclogues. This was our elaboration of his form.

BS: What were your sources for learning about commedia dell'arte?

NK: We were working with an actor at the time. We also previously performed at the Castle Hill Festival north of Boston in a commedia production in which I opened the show as Il Capitano in full armor, riding in on a donkey, to do battle with Arlecchino (knock-down-drag-out, of course).

BS: Sounds fun!

FW: It hooked us on commedia for a while, especially while our kids were little… Gus at age 5 was one of our best coaches - he had a real instinct for it.

BS: Leave it to kids to inform us of things that we miss!

FW: The Lost Spindle actually brings us back to composition -That show came out of our frustration that the songs we were performing, while cleverly hooked together, were not truly written to be performed together. I think in the 16th century some composers must have felt the same way, and entertainments became grander, eventually leading to opera.

BS: I can relate to what you describe. In my own case, years creating and performing multi-media concert programs linked together by various themes with my instrumental early music group,the Washington Camerata, was not enough. Writing a musical was just the antidote! Using the music and culture of today seemed a more spontaneous way to express myself and also to communicate to a wider audience.

FW: There are severe limitations to how much our audiences here in America can comprehend. Americans desperately need more exposure to diverse cultures - and times - We also had a desire to sing to our audience in a more direct fashion - in other words to sing in English. Singing Simpkin, the "tavern drama" that we performed with Grant Herreid and other Ex Umbris friends for five nights for the 1995 Boston Early Music Festival, was another example of this kind of show—very audience-friendly, as it had all the raucous stage action of The Lost Spindle, but unlike that show it was all in English. Of course, hearing a great American poet set to a 17th century lute is still a bit odd, so we do some concerts that are half old and half new - two halves of the concert that is, as well as concerts of all my compositions, but featuring lute in the first half and guitar in the second. So the audience still gets exposure to something both new and old - at the same time.

BS: Doing half and half achieves both aims -- easy communication and new ways of hearing and understanding.

FW: I was about to say - Nancy's poetry is also a critical part of the equation. You see she is helplessly - hopelessly, hatlessly - in love with doing everything! Poetry, photography, designing, singing, acting, telling stories.

BS: I read that you were a photographer in the Peace Corps, Nancy.

NK: Yes, I was a photographer while in the Peace Corps in Peru, but have always kept it "backburnered". My visual art outlet has been doing all the design work as well as masks, costumes and sets for LiveOak. Actually, Frank's editions on Gyre Publications are also a showcase for my photographs, which are on the covers. That way we could justify buying a fancy new printer and printing them ourselves.

FW: They are absolutely gorgeous--both the photographs and the editions.

BS: I just want to say that I am amazed that you have been creating music together (as well as staying married and in love!) for such a long time. How have you pulled this off?

NK: Well, the latest milestone is being empty nesters.

FW: That's wild.

NK: A Julliard grad asked us recently if it was worth it making the sacrifices to our careers that raising children forced upon us. We answered "It sure gives ya something to sing about!"

BS: I'm sure you were torn between your careers and your kids.

FW: But I think it was good for the kids to witness all that, too. They saw us pursuing our passion and willing to live simple lives to do it.

BS: This must have been a wonderful example for them… By the way, do they love the arts?

NK: Our youngest is a guitarist, photographer, sculptor. Our older son loves music, drama, philosophy and history.

FW: Recent studies claim that people in creative disciplines make great parents. Not a surprise—it takes as much creativity as any art!

BS: I agree! …Nancy, do you have anything more you'd like to share about your work with Frank?

NK: I'm really excited about all of Frank's compositions. I think they're terrific. Performing them is so much fun, because they draw from all the musical influences that we have shared, from the wonderful dissonances in the Henze pieces that Frank was playing on the guitar when I met him, to Machaut and the blues. In terms of upcoming projects, I am incubating our next song cycle, which will be about the lives of artists, using my poetry.

FW: It will be essentially our story…

NK: The initial question we pondered as a couple when we were first falling in love was "how can two people be madly in love and still devote the all-consuming energy to their art that it demands?"

BS: You seem to have done that by combining your talents.

FW: We goad each other, we tease each other, we laugh together and cry together … many poems, etc., two kids, and thirty years later we're still working on it!!!

BS: Congrats! How do you see each other's strengths as contributing to the sum of all you create together?

FW: The sum is bigger than the parts...If we had not gone down these paths together, I may never have written the beautiful music I have, Nancy may never have written the poetry. We see this next chapter in our lives as a time to truly create a new body of work – one that reflects all we've been through.

BS: Sounds like an exciting process – I look forward to the results… Well, thanks for giving us these fascinating glimpses into your musical lives!

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