Musicatlas
Music
Wallace has had extensive performance experience in Renaissance music playing lute, vihuela and singing which has affected his style greatly. Enamored of polyphony many of his works have a quasi-Renaissance texture, and a vocal/lyrical nature though his early training in classical guitar makes his guitar works idiomatic. As of the beginning of 2004, he has written nearly 50 songs with guitar or lute accompaniment and over twenty extended works or anthologys for guitar solo and duo. He draws on styles from popular culture as well as most periods of past music.
Life
Wallace, born in Texas, was raised in California and graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory as a guitar major in 1974. He moved to Boston after that and became involved in the Quadrivium chorus where he met his future wife, soprano Nancy Knowles, and many other musical partners. Throughout the 1980’s he performed Renaissance and medieval music with LiveOak and Company, had two boys with Ms. Knowles and moved to the country in southern New Hampshire. There he began to compose in the mid 1990’s, his only teacher being his experience.