Musicians from Roosevelt High School prepare for Carnegie Hall performance

Look up the biography, the long or short version, of any acclaimed musician and you’ll see the phrase “debuted in Carnegie Hall” followed by the date. And mostly likely every single one remembers the experience.

“There is simply no place like it. The first time I stepped foot in Carnegie Hall was in 1964,” the multiple Grammy Award-winning maestro Leonard Slatkin once said.

Next month, a group of Roosevelt High School student musicians will share that thrill. Led by Roosevelt band director Gregg Abe, about 60 of them will be traveling to New York and will perform as part of the 2019 New York Wind Band Festival. The five-day festival, now in its 17th year, features select school and community bands from around the country to perform at the concert hall, a landmark in midtown Manhattan.

“We work with the best of the best, and Roosevelt is no exception to that,” said Molly Wenske of World Projects, the San Francisco Bay Area-based organizer of the festival. She said the organization looks at not only quality performances, but whether a school band is involved in promoting “new music, expanding on what music means, and giving back to the community.”

Abe, who himself performed in Carnegie Hall as a part-time drummer for the Royal Hawaiian Band in the 1990s, said being selected for the festival is “a really big honor, considering the number of quality high school bands who have performed in previous years.”

“I don’t think it’s really hit them yet that they’re going to be performing in Carnegie Hall,” he said after one recent rehearsal, “but with only three more rehearsals to go, I think now they’re realizing it’s getting near.”

Abe needn’t worry. His musicians are plenty excited about the trip and, if a bit nervous, very proud to represent their community.

“It’s pretty cool, a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said junior Margaret Lonborg, who’s been playing trombone since sixth grade. “I was shocked, sitting there in class thinking ‘What?’ Because you never hear about Hawaii bands going to Carnegie Hall. It’s a big thing and if we mess up, it tarnishes the name of our school.”

“It’s crazy. It’s an amazing opportunity to have,” said Harley Beltran, a Roosevelt sophomore who plays alto saxophone. “In the music world in general, it’s just a big name, like ‘oh, I’ve played Carnegie Hall.’ ”

Performance of a lifetime

Since its opening in 1891, Carnegie Hall has been noted not only for the artistry of the performers who have taken its stage — none other than Tchaikovsky conducted the opening-day concert there — but for making them sound as good as they possibly can. Its renowned acoustics are somewhat of a mystery — the architect who gets credit for them, William Burnet Tuthill, left behind no notes on his work — but what is known is that listeners can appreciate rich, resonate sound from every one of the 2,800 seats in its Isaac Stern Auditorium.

That only puts additional pressure on musicians like junior ­Lakota Nguyen, the only tenor saxophonist in the group. “If I mess up, I feel like you can really hear it in Carnegie Hall,” she said. “I know musicians wait their entire lifetimes to perform there, but we’re getting to go as teenagers and we’re so young.”

The band will perform two works: “Four Seasons of Japan,” a lovely cinematic work by Japanese composer Satoshi Yagisawa, and “Diamond Tide,” a work by Vietnamese-American composer Viet Cuong that features unusual percussion instruments, as well as difficult challenges for percussion players. The composers themselves expressed excitement that their work will be played at Carnegie Hall, and they’re planning to go to New York to hear them.

Yagisawa has been friends with Abe for many years, and composed the work for the Roosevelt students at Abe’s request in 2017.

“My work hasn’t been performed at Carnegie Hall in New York yet. So I’m very, very happy!” Yagisawa said in an email. “I love Hawaii. So I composed this piece in hopes that the people of Hawaii and the Japanese will have a deeper relationship and understand each other’s culture.”

Abe originally intended to perform another Yagisawa composition, but the students wanted to play “Four Seasons of Japan.” The piece features rich, anthemlike melodies that conjure up pastoral images of the Japanese landscape. It opens with a flourishing duet played on sax by Beltran and Tiffany Kusano on flute.

“I’m the opening of the first piece we’re playing, so it’s kind of nerve-wracking,” said Kusano, a sophomore who has been playing flute for four years and plays in ­Hawaii Youth Symphony.

Cuong’s “Diamond Tide” was inspired by scientists’ announcement that they could “melt” a diamond. Aside from the “Diamond” in its name, the piece is particularly apropos for a Hawaii band to play, since it employs a number of percussion instruments that use water.

In some passages, students use chopsticks to tap lightly on crystal wineglasses holding water, tilting them at certain angles to create a glissando effect, a “bending” of the pitch. They also strike disclike bells called crotales, which they then dip into buckets of water to bend the pitch. It’s particularly challenging because each of the three percussionists plays an individual note in a melodic line, so they must be in sync.

Raene Imamoto, a senior who plans to pursue music studies in college, will be one of the performers on these instruments. She was “intrigued” by instrumentation of the piece when the band first started playing it last fall.

“When we see buckets, we usually think you’re going to tap on the buckets, so it’s different to be dipping something in the water,” she said. “It’s a lot different but it’s good experience.”

Cuong is a native of Georgia whose work has been praised as “wildly inventive” by The New York Times. He teaches at the esteemed Curtis Institute of Music and met Abe at a music conference a few years ago.

Other works by Cuong have been performed in Carnegie Hall, but he is still thrilled to have “Diamond Tide” make its Carnegie Hall debut.

“It’s incredibly exciting,” he said. “When a group, or a performer or an ensemble goes to perform in Carnegie, it’s such a momentous thing for them, they obviously put a lot of thought into what they’re going to perform. And the fact that they choose a piece of yours, it’s a huge honor.”

Focus and preparation

Roosevelt is not the first local school to send a band to Carnegie Hall. In 2015, Kaimuki Middle School students, under the direction of Susan Ochi-Onishi, performed there as part of the same festival. This year, Ochi-Onishi is one of several professional musicians helping the Roosevelt band prepare for the concert, working exclusively with the oboe section.

“One of the really beautiful things about music in Hawaii is that we’re all connected,” she said during one rehearsal. “Gregg Abe, I’ve known him for a long time, since back in the ’80s. He’s really a hard worker, and since we’re all connected we try to support one another and help each other. So when he asked me to do oboe sectionals — of course.”

Abe, a Roosevelt alumnus who has been teaching there for 33 years, also had the students focus on aspects beyond the music. During one recent rehearsal, he coached them on how to stand up from their chairs after they finished performing, drawing hoots and cheers from them for his deft demonstration.

He’s also been reminding them to wear appropriate clothing, since they’ll be going to a Broadway show and taking a cruise, getting a view of the famous Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty. “Guys, you gotta wear shirts with collars,” he said during one rehearsal. “Aloha shirts are OK.”

“I’m really extremely proud of our students,” Abe said later. “They sacrifice so much time, because I would say that almost every single one of them in that band has other obligations besides band … athletics, student government, part-time jobs. But they make the time to be here and they work extremely hard. So I’m so, so proud of them and I know they will do extremely well out there.”