Mark Carlson

Five Little Pieces (Five Whimsies) for Flute and Piano

Program note by Mark Carlson: Five Whimsies began as a work for my younger sister, Lisa, then a flutist in high school, and Awakening was written as a 15th birthday present for her in 1976. As the rest of the pieces progressed, I began to think of them more as performance pieces for me. In fact, I premiered Sally's Wedding as the bride's processional at my cousin Sally Boni's wedding in 1977. For many years entitled Five Little Pieces a sort of grad student joke, since when used in German (Fuenf Kleine Stuecke) for the title of a Webern work it sounds profound to us Americans - I retitled it when I realized that flutists took the title to mean that the pieces are easy. But in the same way that Schumann's Kinderszenen conveys the naivete and playfulness of childhood without actually being easy to play, these pieces are intended for a flutist with chops.