- [Announcer] In partnership with the Curtis Institute of Music, WHYY presents the following program.

(trumpet music) - My name is James Vaughen.

I am a trumpet student at Curtis.

My first musical exposure was just sitting down at the piano we have at home, just like playing one note over and over again, driving everyone else in the house nuts.

And I started piano lessons in around first grade and continued all throughout high school.

I was in a band program that started in fourth grade and started, I was able to start playing trumpet.

I started playing with my mom sixth grade when I started playing music that had piano parts with the trumpet part.

And so we started playing a lot together when I started getting more serious about trumpet in around eighth grade, we started playing at local retirement homes and nursing centers.

(trumpet music) When my mom and I were playing the nursing homes in town, those concerts had that really big impact on me because I saw how much power music can hold over people.

I realized that there's so much power within music that you can have that I wanted to continue to like, foster and grow and be able to share with people because there's nothing quite the same as like the, the feeling of having impacted someone else in a positive way by sharing music with them.

Gliere's Concerto for Coloratura Soprano is one of my favorite pieces I've been working on recently because it is a rare vocal work in that it doesn't have words.

The first movement on Dante is full of very lush melodies that are traded off between the piano and trumpet.

Throughout the whole first movement, there are these dark undertones that I would say, of like deep longing and a lot of the long melodies I find to be some of the most beautiful music ever written.

(piano and trumpet music) And then the second movement is at a big contrast to the first, because it is more joking and jovial and has a lot of bouncy articulated showy runs between the piano and trumpet and we like trade off.

So like birdsong calls and it leads to a very climactic finish at the end.

(piano and trumpet music) I was a student at the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra program.

I started going there when I was a freshman in high school, Before I even thought about college whatsoever.

I already heard a lot of people talking about auditions and college auditions and where they're auditioning, where they wanted to go.

It definitely was always sort of a dream to be able to come to Curtis, and actually my senior year I auditioned and I did not get in, took a gap year, working for AmeriCorps in a small town in Mississippi and doing like completely not music work while still practicing.

And then reauditioned.

The work I was doing in Mississippi was what kept me most motivated.

Because I was working with, working in public schools and in an afterschool program.

Being able to foster those connections was very inspiring and made me like, be a lot more motivated in my practice actually, outside of that to have sort of more meaningful things happening besides music actually really helped my music grow because I wasn't worried so much about the work and about like the, I have to like be excelling musically right now, because that was not the focus.

The focus was the kids and making sure the kids developed as much as possible Post graduation from school, I'm hoping that wherever I end up, I can work in some capacity with kids and like music programs or non music related programs.

Because I really miss that type of work and like just laying foundations for other students to be able to grow.

One of the things I got to do was take part in a competition called the Next Generation Trumpet Competition, where there was a set of etudes, three etudes written by five different composers commissioned for this competition for each contestant to choose.

There's some required etudes, and some that you got to choose, to record and submit.

One of my favorite pieces there was this short Ballade of the Cardinal, which it's very simple and it's basically just a pentatonic scale, but I find very beautiful and haunting.

(trumpet music) Legende was written by George Enescu, who's a romantic Romanian composer.

This piece in my mind is one of the few romantic works originally written for trumpet.

I believe it tells the story of a hero going on an adventure and it starts off very calmly and the hero gets into some fierce battles in the middle and is in a little bit of conflict with the piano.

They have a little, have some arguments.

And then at the end, everything comes back down to the original calm from the opening.

And unfortunately in my, in my version of the story, the hero dies at the end of the story, as everything comes to a close (trumpet and piano music) I consider myself more of like as a musician, not necessarily as a classical musician, because even if you think about what classically trained means, there's a lot of like, assumptions made and a lot of history there that's not necessarily the best or also not necessarily inclusive for a lot of young people and not as exciting for a lot of young people based on how classical music is sort of portrayed.

And so I think having classical music not be this separate box is really important, and having music be like, this is a type of music that has all this limitless possibilities, both like of music that has been written before and music that is being written now and music that is not written down and other types of music.

Like I think basically the most important thing is to not have it be sort of stuck in a box and have that be like grown and include more, because I think that's the only way classical music will survive and continue to thrive.

(trumpet music) One day warming up doing my buzzing exercises, I realized like, oh, I could bust through this piano piece I'm working on where I play the left hand and my right hand buzzes and then I was like, oh, but I could just like trumpet in one hand, and then from there I was like, oh wow, this actually like works pretty well.

And sort of did Chopin's Prelude In B Minor with like trumpet playing the top line and piano playing the left line.

And then from there continued, continued to work on projects of playing different pieces, including this Flight of the Bumblebee, which is a little cheesy, but it was very fun and kind of just sort of have to practice more piano as well to keep up with the trumpet side of things.

(trumpet and piano music)