Carnegie Hall’s stage has been home to the New York Philharmonic and popular acts like the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. Next month, that stage will also host a trumpet player from Haines High School.
Mark Davis sits alone in the Haines School music room. It’s fourth period. He’s warming up with an assignment from his Atlanta-based trumpet teacher, accompanied only by a digital metronome to keep time. Davis is 17 and by his count, he’s been playing trumpet for seven years. It’s almost his first instrument.
“Voice was my first instrument,” he said.
“And I played lots of instruments like piano, ukulele. I played a little bit of baritone and tuba, and I can’t think of a lot of other ones.”
This year he was selected from a pool of about 20,000 top high school musicians to perform at Carnegie Hall in February. The venue is known as one of the most prestigious in the world for classical and popular music.
“It’s gonna be amazing. Just get to go to New York and see all that amazing stuff… and then Carnegie Hall! It’s the best in the world, so I’m really honored to be able to go there,” he said.
The Haines community already knows the sound of Davis’ trumpet: he’s played in the Fourth of July Parade and the Southeast State Fair Parade, as well as the high school’s band and pep band. On some Sundays, he plays at church in a quartet with his father, Matt, and brothers Luke and John.
But next week, he’ll be on a plane to New York to play with a band of nearly 100 other student musicians from around the globe. They will perform five pieces, including Exaltation, by Phillip Spark. It’s Davis’ favorite selection, in part because of the trumpet solo. It’s unknown which student will get the part, so he’s practicing just in case.
It’s a melodic section of the song.
“It feels like kind of like flying, really,” he described.
“Like just floating over the line and where it’s going because it’s really not going just from note to note. It’s going from the starting place to wherever the phrase is going, and that can kind of just be decided by my imagination, you know, and what I decided to do with the trumpet.”
The Honors Performance series is run by a company called WorldStrides that organizes education and travel experiences for students. Vice President of Marketing and Communications Beth Campbell says the Carnegie Hall experience is life-changing.
“So many of these students have gone on to careers in music, and even those who don’t tell us that this experience is transformative for them. It’s certainly an asset to them on their college applications as they’re thinking ahead to their future,” she said.
It’s also an opportunity to work with conductor Kenneth Ozzello, the band director and music professor at the University of Alabama, and meet other young musicians from across the globe.
Davis is a junior this year, and says he plans to pursue a career playing trumpet after high school… with a Carnegie Hall performance already on his resume.
