Soliloquy 

Program Notes

In early 1998, the School of Music at the University of Redlands, where I had spent my first two years as an undergraduate, invited me to give a talk to music students on my life as a musical jack-of-all-trades. At that time, I was teaching at Santa Monica College, running Pacific Serenades, the chamber music ensemble/concert series that I had founded, composing, and performing as a flutist. Alexandra Pierce, who had extended the invitation to me, asked if I would write a new piece for solo flute and, as part of my presentation, perform it.

In typical Mark-Carlson fashion, I finished the piece the night before my talk and scrambled to learn it in the morning before I drove to Redlands—the large leaps at the climax of the piece are typical of how I have long written for flute, and they are quite difficult. For a long time, the score looked a bit like a piece by Bach: no articulations and very few dynamics; in my haste to finish the piece, I didn’t have time to mark those in. The piece lay dormant for about seven years after that, when I took it out of its mothballs and performed it again, at which point I began to appreciate its introspective beauty.