Paths in Progress
Paths in Progress
Mark Hughes: Principal Trumpet at Houston Symphony, Faculty at University of Houston
As a young elementary school student, Mark wanted to play the saxophone. His band director thought he should play the trumpet. Who knew that decision would so drastically impact the trajectory of his life? Mark joins us to share his story and how he made a living as a freelance performer for many years, as well as explain the process to audition for major symphony orchestras, what the life of a principal trumpet player looks like, his practice routine, and what advice he often shares with the students in his university trumpet studio. Like many artists, Mark started a side business during the pandemic, which he enjoys and continues today. If you have any interest as a performer or freelancer in any capacity, don’t miss this episode!
You can read more about Mark Hughes at https://markhughestrumpet.com/.
Thank you for joining us today on Paths in Progress. I'm your host, Carrie Young. On this podcast, people in a variety of career fields, talk about their journey from choosing their college, deciding which majors and minors to pursue, their first jobs out of college, and all of the hurdles, detours and victories along their path through today. Our goal is to help students hear about a variety of exciting opportunities out there and understand what day-to-day life is like in these careers. I hope you enjoy and learn from our story today. Thanks for listening. Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We are here today with Mark Hughes, who is the principal trumpet of the Houston Symphony. He's also an affiliate artist in trumpet at the University of Houston, where he teaches trumpet to students, and he has his degree in trumpet performance. So Mark, thanks so much for joining us today.
Mark:How are you?
Carrie:Great. I'm so glad you're here. I've heard your story before and I've loved the way that you've told it to students, and so I really wanted to have you here on the podcast to do the same.
Mark:It's a pleasure to be here.
Carrie:Thanks so much. So your career has been with your instrument and I think that's something that a lot of students perhaps dream about or perhaps think about, but don't really know how that's really gonna look. Don't really understand what that's like in real life, so to speak. I think we have a lot of media perceptions of musicians, right, that are in the public eye. So I would love to give students a glimpse into what your life is like with that. So can you take us back to when you started playing the trumpet and how this journey started for you?
Mark:Well, you know, I started like, I think most students do. I started in elementary school, and just deciding an instrument was a little bit traumatic. I did have an older sibling, a brother who was a trumpeter and very good. An allstater, et cetera. But I wanted to play the saxophone and my initial band director was a trumpeter who did gig on the side. And I guess he thought there was enough in my bloodline that he sort of manipulated the system a little bit. And when I was trying instruments, he basically said saxophone wasn't for me and I had to choose between trumpet and flute, and I didn't really want to play the flute. He made me try it though, and just to see, and sort of worked the system to where I ended up being a trumpet player or started actually on a cornet. Immediately I had found myself excelling. I think that's true of most people. If you are doing something and it turns out that you're good at it, it starts bringing some confidence building to you as some being more self-assured. And that happened in my life and I started getting some esteem from being better at the trumpet than the rest of the people around me. And that sort of led me to practice more. And so by the time I was in junior high, I think I was a little unusual in this, I was in a band that was above my years, got to go to the Midwest back in the day when they only took one junior high band and Oh wow. So I had a lot of exposure, and getting that, being able to sit down and have breakfast one morning, I remember with Claire Grundman, a pretty famous band composer at that time, started me thinking that there may be a possibility of having a career in music in some way, but all I had been exposed to was that of being a band director.
Carrie:Yeah.
Mark:And so as I progressed, and started taking private lessons, my private lesson teacher was also a band director who taught privately on the side. That was okay, but didn't thrill me as much. After a couple of years, I was a better player than my private teacher was. And he wanted me to find another teacher. There was a sort of some amazing events that occurred, but somehow it worked out where I started studying with a member of the Atlanta Symphony. A man named Joseph Walthall, who is actually still a friend today. But he taught me, as a high schooler. and really progressed me along the sort of path, to be quite a good trumpeter already. And by the time I was a senior in high school, I actually started subbing with the Atlanta Symphony and actually had recorded, with the famous choral conductor, Robert Shaw. Yeah. And, remember having to get outta high school to go do recording sessions. That's thrilling.
Carrie:Yeah.
Mark:That's still a thrill, you know, at my age now. But back then, I mean, you can imagine, sorry, I have to be outta school. I have to go play a recording session with the Atlanta Symphony. That's something that a lot of people can't even grab a hold of. So at any rate, I was getting all kinds of encouragement along the way because of the success that I was having. I was an avid practicer. I would practice more than I would put on my practice cards. So yes, I lied on my practice card, but in the opposite direction.
Carrie:Don't see that too often.
Mark:No, you don't. So I didn't want people to know what a trumpet music geek. I really was. I would literally practice many hours a day and drive my parents crazy. But I, I loved it. Until high school, that was the first time I'd ever seen that there was an opportunity to perform professionally. I was also very interested in jazz and playing big band. And I was a lead, in my high school, big band. I also was lead in the Allstate big man every year. So I was pretty good at it, obviously. That was something I really love and I still love to this day, but at that time I could already kinda get the feel that society was changing and their wants and I didn't see that that was really an option to make it a career. I mean, most of the big band players too, they were either playing late at night, you know, getting in at one or 2:00 AM in the morning is not a great way to be a father to raise kids when they're getting up at 6:00 AM the next morning, right?
Carrie:Yeah. Yeah.
Mark:Uh, it's a difficult life. Can it be done? Yes, it can be, but you're gonna have to have a pretty understanding spouse and it's just a difficult life. When I saw an orchestra life pattern that fit more of what my goals were in life that I had for myself, even at an early age, that's when I started gravitating toward that. And fortunately for me, the orchestral career now involves so much pops that it's afforded me a chance, in my present position about one week a month we're playing pops. Pops can sometimes be big band, sometimes it can be modern music. It can also be pop music from the seventies, eighties, nineties. So it's, you know, something that keeps me in touch with that part of me that wanted to play that style and keeps it interesting. many classical players hate doing Pops. I actually don't hate doing Pops. In fact, this weekend I've rotated myself out on a pops week and I'm sort of sitting at home preparing for my next five or six weeks, which are pretty hard. However, I'm missing being at work playing the pops. So, that's still a good sign when at my age that I still enjoy my job enough that I want to be there even though I'm not there. So that was a sort of a benefit. And that occurred in my late high school years. There was a band director who I was supposed to start studying privately with going into 10th grade, and I won't mention his name because it was quite an upsetting kind of time period, in the area where I grew up. But he was murdered. and I was supposed to start studying with him. He was a commercial player and a band director. They never solved the crime was a double murder. It was really, really a shocking thing. And it was the father of my best friend. When that occurred, that kind of, you know, as you would expect it rattled my, my life. Yeah. And that sort of helped me decide to go into something that's a little less risky maybe. You know, you don't hear of classical musicians, playing a nightclubs in the middle of the night too often. But, that was a sort of a real, wake up call for me to start thinking about, different things if I were to choose music as a performing kind of, life, performing career. So, that really helped. And then when it came time to start looking at colleges, I'm a pretty bad example of what to do. I mean I really am, I only applied to one school and I don't know if it was because of, so much ego or what, but I was told that the guy I wanted to study with was the famous Vincent Cichowicz who taught at Northwestern University. And so I applied early notification at Northwestern and I got in. And I got a lot of scholarship money and I never bothered to apply anywhere else. So, yeah.
Carrie:For students listening, you know, when you do apply early notification, obviously you find out earlier, right? There usually is time to apply to some additional backup schools after that if that, you know, were to happen for someone else if they needed that. So, I understand what you're saying, but also, you would've had time to apply to other places if you needed to.
Mark:That's correct. Right. Or sadly, back in the day when I did it, early notification meant that you were notified on February the first.
Carrie:Oh wow.
Mark:And yeah, so early notification the day. Yeah. That's not nearly as traumatic cuz you usually find out what about December one or something like that.
Carrie:I think it depends on the institution.
Mark:So see then you really have time to use a backup school. Well, for me, I didn't find out until February the first. There may have been a possibility of getting an app in might not have made an audition date. I don't know. But well I had no guidance. Mm-hmm. And I think that's why something like this kind of podcast can be such a useful tool for students. Cuz when you're in high school, you need to start thinking about college admission, you know, before halfway through your senior year.
Carrie:Right.
Mark:So for me, you know, it was one of those things kind of, luck. I don't know if that was divine intervention or what, but it worked out for me. And I got into Northwestern University and I did get to study with the famous Vincent Cichowicz, who was probably the greatest pedagogue of the 20th century. Having lessons with him was amazing. He took a really talented, but sort of scattered young men and he sorta shaped me into a much, much more consistent player. Maybe whittling off a little of the highs, but making me very solid and consistent. And as a professional, that's what's needed. And you want someone who every day is going to come to work and give you a certain level and not be too erratic. He was the the guy who did that for me.
Carrie:It's so important for students to hear that because I think a lot of students look at schools based on reputation or what someone else tells'em, perhaps what a teacher encourages them to do. and maybe the professional reputation of a teacher. But it's so important to try to perhaps talk to students who are already in that studio or have a one-on-one conversation with that teacher because the impact that that teacher has on your life, you know, for fourish years of that one-on-one time is so significant and that connection is important. Even if that's a phone call or email or visiting to talk to other students in their studio is so important to find out about what that interaction is like and about what that teacher prioritizes and what their expectations are. And if that seems like a good fit for you.
Mark:Well, exactly. People don't think about this because they don't know. The one teacher that you will have every semester, the whole time you're doing your undergrad in particular, but even grad students as well, doctoral students, you're gonna see your private instructor. Even if you are a music education major, it doesn't matter. You still have to have an instrument. And that teacher is somebody you're gonna see for at least an hour every week. To think that they don't have a big impact on your life, positive or negative, is kind of putting your head in the sand. You know, that's a very important relationship. So I, I would recommend for students who are looking into going into music to do the best they can at trying to do a little bit of research. see what the teaching history is of that instructor. See if the students have been successful. And also if you can talk to a few, never just weigh one person's view, because there can always be, of course, personality conflicts or something. But if you can get a consensus of what people feel about the teacher, what the pros and cons are with that person and see if it's a good fit for them. In the case of my teacher, Mr. Cichowicz was such a methodical teacher. I was this like, a very erratic, very gifted, I won't, you know, negate that there was a lot of talent there, but a lot of it had not been all refined. and I needed someone who came across, kind of, sadly, he was kind of a boring guy. He was so methodical in everything he did. I remember chuckling inside my brain. Would never let him see me chuckling at him. had so much respect and, admiration for him and his career. But when he would pick up his trumpet to play, it took him like 10 seconds to set his ambushure, and then he would slowly move his fingers on the valves. Where most people quickly like, press the valves down, set their ambushure, and within a second, a second and a half, they're playing. Yeah. Not Mr. Cichowicz. It was as if he was thinking through everything that he did. And at first I thought that was so crazy. But for someone like me, who had never thought about anything that I did, it made me sort of reevaluate and go through the stages of what I did and refine those rough edges and make me something that was very marketable. And so it was the perfect fit for me. We rarely at the high school age know what we really need. And so if you do have a private instructor or something like that, you can always try to find someone, a guidance counselor, whatever, that can help you, kind of map out a strategy of maybe finding what's best for you. One other thing I'd like to mention about is that to remember as a student, especially going into college, you become the purchaser. And when you're in school, if it turns out after your freshman year you're having a miserable time with a teacher, you can always request a different teacher. Or if there's not another teacher at the school, you can transfer and go to a different school. Right. We live at an age now where we have a good bit of choice and it's not that difficult to find. Maybe you go to your second choice school and try to say, Hey, you know, I'm not loving it where I am, you know, and it can open up the conversation that may be transferring to another place. I don't want the people who are listening to the podcast to think that this decision is a one time only street. And if you goof up, your life is. it's not right. I've had a lot, lot of good students come in as transfer students at U of H. I've even had kids who had not so successful undergraduate sort of experiences and come for graduate school and blossom. There's always an option. Don't ever get to a point where you feel like, you know, I made a mistake and I have screwed up my life forever. I see so many kids today that are so stressed out. The anxiety level is super high over the college decision. You know, try to be wise about how difficult it is, but also realize that there's always options.
Carrie:Yeah, that's such a good point cuz there's, there's a lot of things that you just don't know until you try them too. I think one of the most consistent kind of inner battles I've seen students go through over the years in music is, you know, the conservatory environment versus a large state institution versus a small liberal arts college. You know, they think I'm gonna love this particular environment and then they learn, no, this is not the environment that I think I'm gonna do best in. I think I need to switch to this other environment because even those big generalities. You know, you have impressions of what they are or perhaps other people have told you about their experience. But when you get in it, you're like, oh no, this is not this is not where I should be. And it's okay to change, it's okay to transfer. It is okay to change your mind. That is a big, scary thing to do. But if you're really feeling that in your gut, you know, that can make all the difference to put yourself in a different environment, you know, whatever that context is for you.
Mark:I can remember, one thing that did cross my mind a lot is I did not want to go to a conservatory. I thought that I didn't want to be just around a bunch of, you know, music geek kind of things where people were constantly talking music 24 7, you know? And so I wanted to go to a university. And I remember writing that on my application. They had you write a couple of papers as part of the application process. And I remember saying that about Northwestern. And kind of interestingly enough, I did not room with music majors for three years. And then my senior year I lived in a house of all brass players. It was called the Brass House in oh my, where we had seven, seven brass players living in a three story house, in Evanston, Illinois. Then it was like our own little trombone and tuba fraternity, which was a great experience. But I didn't want that. I wanted that to grow more. And you know, ironically when I got to Northwestern of a music school there, it set up much like a conservatory. So as much as I tried Yeah. to get away from it, I still got that kind of environment, but still on a university campus, which most conservatories are on a university campus. So, it ends up being what it is sometimes when you get there. But I grew to love what I inherited sort of, I just hadn't done enough homework to know what Northwestern was really like. I did get to have a trip my junior of high school, my private teacher at the time, Joseph Al took me up to Northwestern to have a lesson with Cichowicz. And so I did get to play for him and see what he was like. I also saw a recital. I was there. And also got to see the campus, during the late spring, which was good. Because the next year, the only other time I went to campus was to audition on, I think it was the end of January and there was five feet of snow on the ground. Being from the south, I think if I'd seen that the first time, I probably would've never gone.
Carrie:While we're talking about undergrad, can you talk a little bit about what you suggest students do to take advantage of their undergraduate time? Because you have this perspective obviously during your own undergraduate, but now you teach undergraduate students, so you see a lot of people go through their undergraduate degree making great decisions, making not so great decisions. Choosing to use their time in different ways. So do you have some advice just regarding that capsule of time you have as an undergraduate student and how to take advantage of that?
Mark:Yeah. One thing that I would advise, well, I do advise all of my students to do and they don't always take my advice. Being the way I am, I'm always gonna give you my advice, and you can choose to take it or not. But what I recommend all of my incoming freshmen to do, since they're a trumpet player, they're, you know, instrumentalists that play an instrument and have played in bands their whole career thus far, is to play in marching band. And a lot of times people have a sort of like, I'm tired of marching band. I never want to do that again. Or they love it and it's kind of not a in between, it's one of the other. Yeah. And I still encourage them to always take advantage of that, especially their first year when they first get there. And the reason is you usually get together for a band camp a week or so during the summer, or maybe it's a few days right before school starts. It's kind of like An immersion of sorts into college life. And you immediately have people, you have people that are like you. They're all different kinds of people, but you have this one common thread. And you may think, well, you know, I've had that in high school. Yeah. But when you go to a college campus, you probably don't know anybody else there. Or if you do, there's only one or two other people that are there. You may or may not even like those people. So it's good for you to have a group of people that become yours and that you have an automatic friend base, and they might not be your best friends for your duration. But there will be a time, usually in your freshman year, and a lot of times it happens in the first semester where you've been away from home for several weeks. you get kind of dark and gloomy things aren't going as well as maybe you wanted them to. There's that transition of you're growing up and, and it's hard and you need to have something that makes you get out of your dorm room so you don't isolate. That's what I found marching man to be. At Northwestern, we did not have to be in marching band and it was a performance based music school more heavily. Of course, there were very few music ed majors. I actually was lied to and told that I had to be in marching band, which is a good thing because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have done it. But I had those people and one of my truly closest best friends of life who I still go and stay with when I go up and play with the Chicago Symphony. I use his guest room and I still see him to this day. And this is over 40 years of friendship, was a tuba player who was in marching band with me, and I met him cause of marching band. If not, I might not have met him. Every Sunday night we would meet for dinner and we would complain about all of the awful things that had happened to us that week. It really was the cheapest version of psychological counseling that you could get in a way. That was so important. So, that's one thing I think people should take advantage of all of the ensembles that they can without being, you know, don't overload yourself to you where you don't have time to practice. But I do think it's important to get something in your schedule to where you're busy enough that you're always sort of out networking and moving around with people. The other things is, as you go along, in your college years, you will have a friend base, but you'll also have people that are on your own instrument that you will know and hopefully you will like. And I always encourage my students to do a lot of playing for one another. And, and I think it's very helpful, whether you want to be a music educator full-time or not. You're gonna be a music educator, right? In some way or another. You're gonna either be teaching privately, you're going to run across and do masterclass. You're gonna, in some way or another, be shaping the next generation. And you need to start refining those skills. And I think the best way to do that is with your colleagues. And so that when you're playing for each other, you start developing a critical ear, but you also learn how to say things to your friends. You don't just want to say, yeah, well that sucked. You don't want to be so crass about your review of someone who you like, that you hurt their feelings. So you start learning to shape what you say into a constructive and uplifting way. I really had to train myself to be able to do that. And I felt that that was an advantage to go ahead and start doing it. We were encouraged at Northwestern to play for each other actually, all the time. And in all honesty, I learned more from my colleagues at Northwestern than I did from my teacher. Yeah. And one of my colleagues, at the time I was at Northwestern is in the section with me here in the Houston Symphony. I have three other colleagues that are in another section right next to me, that are from Northwestern, in the Houston Symphony. And there's about, 10 or 11, maybe 12 of us in the orchestra that went to Northwestern and about seven or eight of us were there at the same time. Wow. And that's a highly unusual Yeah. Very, very unusual in the professional world. The relationships, I mean, it's not just even friendships where you have this respect for one another's ears, so you know that they hear things that maybe you don't hear or vice versa, and you play for each other all through from the time we were in school. And you learn from that. Yeah. I think that's the way to get the most bang for your buck, if you're thinking about going to college. And you start that lifelong learning process because ideally you never want to stop learning, you know?
Carrie:Yeah. it's an important reminder too that a lot of our learning takes place outside of the classroom, right. A lot of the mm-hmm. most important skills and things that we learn and relationship building. And part of that is looking around at the people that you're in school with, you know, regardless of what you're studying, frankly, and think about how can I learn from these people? Particularly the ones that are ahead of you, you know, in school and that have more experience. Because there's a lot of ways you can learn from your peers, from the graduate students around you, from observation of a lot of different things that is not necessarily gonna be taught to you, you know, in a class.
Mark:Right. I mean, the another thing that I really push hard on my students to do is to go see the performing arts here and the city of Houston. We're lucky to be in a major, major city that has great arts groups and to be able to go down and see what the professionals in your field, what that life is like. I mean, that helps you early on to refine wh whether or not that's something you want to do. I have a student right now who is a senior, he's about to graduate and he is a terrific, you know, trumpeter. Delightful young man. And he wanted to do was be a band director, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't differentiate between my ed majors and my performance majors. I treat them the same. They have the same requirements. They get worked with the same intensity. It makes no difference. But he kept blossoming going and seeing performing groups, et cetera. And now, even though he is still an education major, and you'll be doing some student teaching this semester, he's also gonna be subbing with the Houston Symphony in a couple of weeks. Which I think all of my students would love to do, but he's getting to do that. And that is somebody who changed his career sort of goals while at school. Yeah. And that's unusual. A lot of times people come with big dreams of performing and realize, Ooh, I don't think I'm gonna be able to make it. And they have to change more into another sort of avenue, be it education or music therapy or whatever it is that they want to go into in this field. Well, this young man is changed in the other direction. And that is because he went to see performing arts groups. I think he didn't know from where he grew up that there was an option that he could be a performer. And he's gone to one professional audition and he was a finalist already. Wow. So, wow. There's a real good chance he's going to eventually succeed. It's really important I think for a music student, no matter if you're going to be a performer or not, to go and see live music performances, there's so much that you can learn. There's so many motivations that can be obtained from going to those performances. And then for that matter, being in this great city that we live in, there are also art museums. Anything that you can do to broaden your mental horizons, you know, will make you a better musician. You will make you a better teacher. It will make you a better human being. And so that seems so trite to just say, Hey, you need to be doing these things, but you really do. It will grow you. We don't always think about that the Baroque period of music sort of lines up with the height of being a pirate, you know, what do those have to do with each other? Kind of crazy crossovers in history, what was going on at the same time, you know? Yeah. And it's important to help us learn how to interpret music. If you're a music educator and you're a band director and you need to interpret music, are you always going to take, you know, the stock recording that everyone has done and use that as a model? Or maybe you have something new to say, and base it on the historical context of the piece that you are hoping to interpret and teach to your students and, you know, light a fire in them. So, I, I always encourage my students to at least take advantage of this. If you're at a school and you're in a more rural area where you don't have that, you know, that is something to consider when you're choosing schools. I think it's really important. When I was in Chicago at Northwestern University, I was able to go to the art institute, and I'll never forget the first time I saw the very back wall, this huge Georgia O'Keefe, beautiful painting. I mean, it was just so much larger than life. And being able to walk around downtown and go see the symphony. First time I went to see an opera live, I mean, oh my goodness. Just being introduced to things that were, you know, and I'd grown up in, in Atlanta, Georgia. It wasn't that I wasn't exposed, but I wasn't exposed to things on that grand of a scale. Yeah. And it really started, like I said, that lifelong learning process. And I do think it broadens us and makes us have a little bit more to say in our chosen career field.
Carrie:Yeah, absolutely. As you were nearing the end of your undergraduate degree, what were you thinking about in terms of next steps? And do you feel like you had guidance with that or did you have kind of an idea in your head of where you thought you wanted to be going?
Mark:You know, that's a really great question. And for me, I took a, a little bit of an unorthodox path. But yeah, I started the end of my senior year, I started taking every audition I could. I wasn't having a lot of success at the beginning. We did not work at Northwestern on audition preparation at all, which is shocking. Oh wow. But you just didn't do that much back in the day. And now, we have become little factories. Music schools work constantly on preparing kids to do well because we're measured on how many students end up doing well after graduation. People are really attuned to that like I know at U of H I think we have almost our complete a hundred percent sort of placement for our ED students. Performance schools do that too, and you start seeing how many schools put their students out into major orchestras, for instance, or are the national military bands in D.C., that kind of thing. And those are all important steps. So when you get to being a senior, you start, I guess to reevaluate. What am I going to do? Am I where I need to be right now to go ahead and start my career? Or do I need more education? And for me, when I got to that point, I didn't want to go for any more school, at least at that point. But I did think about it and I knew leaving Northwestern, there were not many places that would not be a step down. You know, I was part of an amazing trumpet studio while I was there studying with the best teacher possible. But there were two options for me. I could have gone to Julliard for, a master's and there are times today that I still regret not doing that. One, I wish I had more degrees and not that I need'em in my performing field, but it might be nice in the teaching field to have that. And the other thing is the students who I would've been exposed to at that time ended up being the principal player in Philadelphia and the principal player in Cleveland. Nothing wrong with where I am. I'm a very lucky person to have the job I have. I'm fully aware of it. But who knows? Would that have meant that I would've been principal in a one of the other big five? You never know that that experience or would it have soured me on playing and me never have done anything. That's those things you just never know because that's the path I didn't choose to take. The other one was to go to the Eastman School of Music. At that time where Charlie and Barbara were teaching, who have now become the most celebrated trumpet instructors the world has ever seen, and have placed students in every major orchestra in this country and all over the globe. They're fabulous teachers. Well, they were young and had just been teaching there two or three years at Eastman, but it was already an option for me to consider. So I was thinking about those two. And then I also knew that there was an opportunity for me in Chicago to be in the civic orchestra, which was the official training orchestra for the Chicago Symphony. And that's by audition, et cetera. Well, that's where I ended up landing and going through that. So I don't have a master's degree, but I did get additional training, and that afforded me scholarship lessons with the famous Bud Herseth, the principal trumpet player for 53 years of the Chicago Symphony. And probably shaped my life more than anything else. So that was what I did. And that's a little unorthodox, but that's what I felt like I wanted to do. By the time I was, you know, 22 years old, I knew a little bit about myself and how I would respond and that turned out to be a really good decision.
Carrie:That's a great thing for students to think about too, that, you know, a lot of times we get caught up in going to the next step because that's what you think you're supposed to do, or following this kind of thing, because that's what everybody else does.
Mark:When really, and I could have always gone back, right?
Carrie:Yeah, of course.
Mark:Go to grad school two years later, many people do that. And that's actually what I told myself. Well, let's do this while I can. Yeah. So that's just the options that we always can go back to school no matter what. There was a retired president of a school, cannot remember her name, but she was at Kennesaw State University. And she would speak at every one of their graduations. And I can remember as a young player, I would play at those graduations. And she was always eager to tell this story of her husband who had had a good career in business and had multiple degrees already. And he approached her in his mid to late fifties and he said to her, you know, I'd really like to go to law school. And she took a little, breath and then she said, okay, I think you should go to law school then. And he said, but the problem is, after I got outta law school, in three years, whatever it was, I'm going to be 62 years old or something like that. And she said, well, you know, in three or four years you're gonna be 62 years old regardless. So why don't you go to law school? So he did, and he got his law degree and he started practicing law after that. The opportunity is always there for us, you know, and especially in this country, we are afforded the ability to still do that. We can make these choices. And so I do think it's important for students to realize you don't always have to follow the form and go immediately into graduate school. Yeah. Sometimes we need that maturing just to even know to make a good decision on where we want to go to grad school or what our maybe refined subject matter might be. So, yeah, for me, that's what I did. And after going through the civic orchestra Chicago training, I then went out and started my career. So it was a good decision for me at the time. Sometimes when I look back, I still always wonder what career paths might have been afforded me in different ways if I had thought to get more degrees. But it all has worked out so well for me. There's really, you know, I shouldn't have any regrets. It's just kind of a curiosity, I guess, at this point.
Carrie:Yeah. So as far as the history of your performance career and the different positions you've held in the different places you've played and all the auditions that you've done. Can we talk a little bit about that trajectory and what that's like to be in the audition space and what that process looks like. Because people don't graduate from undergrad and become a principal player in a major symphony. And if they do, that's very rare.
Mark:That's rare. Yeah, that's very rare.
Carrie:So what is that look like to kind of grow through the years, to work your way up to that and, what was your story and how did you get there and go through that process?
Mark:Well, first off, I want to say, you know, there's a lot of musicians who are extremely happy working musicians who never play principal. Right. You know, in an orchestra, the demands are equal on all of the positions as far as what you need to do on the instrument, pretty much. The difference a lot of times boils down to personalities and whatnot of which positions you may fit into. And there is more pressure. That's why principal players are compensated more, and in some orchestras substantially more because the pressure that we deal with. I jokingly tell people that when you look at the stage of a major orchestra, you're looking at a hundred people who are adrenaline addicts. And we're addicted to the fear that comes about of the pressure we put on ourselves to perform. And there's a lot of truth to that. When you're thinking about going into a performing career, it is stressful. You do grow to a great bit of that stress, but to tell you that I don't get nervous, it would be a lie. I am 61 and a half years old at the time of this recording right now. I still get nervous everywhere I go to play. it is because that, I know that it's never a hundred percent that I'm going to nail everything. You know, cause I am interested and I have a lot invested in every note that I play. It matters. There are nerves that come in, anxiety that comes along with that. Now, as I said, we are kind of addicted to that. I, I love that. And when I sit at home like this weekend and I'm not playing, it's kind of boring for me. And I have work that I have to do to be prepared for next week and the weeks that are coming. But, you know, it's not as thrilling and I love that thrill, but that thrill might not be for everyone. There are positions in the orchestra that you can still have a little bit of that thrill without, you know, Drinking that adrenaline through a fire hose like I do. Yeah. Yeah. So that is something that we sort of have to come in touch with as you audition for different positions. But when I first started, I was taking every audition I could actually afford to go to. Unlike other businesses, I can remember my brother was an engineering major and he would just go out to the mailbox and there would be air tickets. Being sent to him to do a plant trip or whatever, and they would fly him. Well in our business, they don't do that. And you are going to be paying your own way for each one of these auditions. So it can be quite the expense to go and audition for these orchestras. Usually if you make it to the finals, and if the finals aren't held at the same time, just about every audition, I know after you make it to the finals, then they will cover your cost of coming back for the final rounds of auditions. But those preliminaries are on you. And that can be expensive. And rarely do you win your first audition. So you kind of have to be prepared for that too. And it may mean you're working a day job just to pay for things on the side, or maybe doing a tremendous amount of private teaching, which has its own fatigues and everything that you're doing. But that's all part of that pushback that you're going to get if you're gonna try to make a career in music. And I started taking, like I said, every audition I could. The very first was the Houston Symphony, and there was a third assistant principal opening at the time, and I was the very first to play. And I remember walking down into Jones Hall, into the basement of Jones Hall and Dave Kirk, the tuba player who still plays in the orchestra today, was a young player in the orchestra and he was the proctor. And I remember seeing him, but everybody else was behind a screen. And it's so interesting that I have that clear memory even after, you know, 40 whatever years it is, 40 years I guess. That I remember being scared to death, literally petrified and not playing very well. That's all that I remember him being excused and I was the very first person to play. So the chances of me advancing were like 0% anyway. That was my first experience. And on that same trip, I went to a little orchestra in Shreveport. A bunch of us did. On the way back, we stopped at Shreveport and took an audition there. Totally different kind of audition, not run as well. I didn't really feel like it was necessarily a fair audition. I think they kind of knew what they were wanting or knew who they wanted immediately, and things were different back in those days a lot too. And that was sort of a negative taste in my mouth. So I had two bad taste of different kinds, in that first trip. I continued to take other auditions in the smaller orchestra. I kind of thought I had a better chance at. I never advanced. And truthfully, you know, rarely, I was trained as a big orchestra player and so I didn't really start making finals. And so I started taking more big orchestra editions. So that was sort of my process. I did win one small orchestra job right outta school. I was able to play for a year in Charleston, South Carolina as principal trumpet there. And, it paid so poorly. I mean, really, really bad. I couldn't really survive. And after that year, I quit. and went and became a freelance player in the Atlanta area and I could make more money freelancing and teaching private lessons about three times, four times as much, as I was in that little coastal town at the time. It played some great concerts, but you know, it was just, it was not right for me.
Carrie:With the freelancing, can you talk a little bit about your decision to do that and then how you approached that? Because I think that sounds scary to a lot of people, right?
Mark:It is. I can remember my father was completely like against it. He felt that was just, oh my gosh, Mark, you'll never know where your next check is. But I was young. I think I was 23 when I made that decision. 23, maybe 24. I was married, but you know, we were both young, no children or anything, so, you know, hey, life's a thrill, you know? So what I did, I did have some contacts in that city cuz I grew up in Atlanta, right? And I knew the guys in the trumpet section or at least a couple of them. And so there was an occasional opportunity to sub with the Atlanta Symphony, which that was not going to be enough for me to survive. But I started a little private teaching studio. I never taught more than about 20, maybe peaked out at 25 students. Cuz I wanted to continue to practice a lot and be able to hopefully win a major orchestra job. But that was enough to cover my rent. And then I started taking every little audition I could in the Atlanta area. There happened to be an opening in the ballet orchestra. I took that audition. It wasn't for principal, it was for third assistant principal, and I won it. So I had a little bit more steady income. And then there was an opera company that was starting up and it was being hired per service. My old teacher who had become, in the meantime, the personnel manager of the Atlanta Symphony was hiring that group and hired me for principal trumpet of the little opera company. And that continued to grow. And over the years, the other freelance work, church work and things like that, that you can piece together comes about really through word of mouth. And a lot of times people think, well, you go in and you need to send letters to every church known man and all that. And I don't think that's really the way to go about it personally. I think your reputation is the best thing you can do. Every job you go to, you remember, every note you play is gonna be remembered by somebody, and word of mouth will eventually be your best advertisement because contractors tend to not look at something that they get in the mail that goes straight into the trash or an email that they get that also goes into your computer trashcan. What they do is ask the players that they know and trust if they can't play a job, who, who's new in town? Who should I call? Yeah, so it's word of mouth and it does take time. So if you think you may be interested in going into like a freelance career, know that it's going, you have to give it about a year, 18 months to start settling in, and you're gonna have to make a living somehow enough to be able to cover your rent and to have food to eat. Private teaching can really help on that. Sometimes you have to take a a side hustle job, you know, and do that and invest yourself in making sure that you're always playing your best. Always show up early to your jobs. A contractor does not like to be looking at the watch and you scrolling in 10 minutes before the downbeat. You know, you have to be smart about this, you need to be a great employee. So for me, freelancing was a great training ground. I ended up freelancing for almost a decade before getting a permanent position in the Atlanta Symphony. I wasn't taking as many auditions at that point because my wife at the time had won a job in the Atlanta Symphony already. And so we're pretty well positioned and I made a great career out of freelancing and ended up being a contractor and doing all kinds of other work that I never would've thought I would've done. and was very good at it actually. Surprisingly good at being an orchestral contractor. Different kind of stress but, it was something that I enjoyed a great deal. One thing about freelancing that, people who are in major orchestras, well, I'm sure would agree with me on this. You can put up with anybody for a week, and then that week is probably over and you may never have to work with that person again. Where if you're in a major orchestra, the people you sit beside, you sit beside every day, week after week, after year, after decade. You sit beside them for a long time, and so you better hope you, they're a likable person if it's a jerk. You're stuck with that. And it, it's kinda like a family in a way. And unfortunately you can divorce it, but then you're out of a job. So that's one benefit to freelancing some of my most fun years. Whereas a freelancer, the pressure was not as great. The quality of course was not as good. That's a different thing. But, you know, in Atlanta it also afforded me a schedule to where I did a good bit of recording sessions. I did a lot of fun jingles and things that I would've not been able to necessarily do if I were playing principal in the Philadelphia Orchestra or something. It's a different life. But I did thoroughly enjoy it and made the best of it. And I do think that there is room, even to this day, for people to have a full satisfying career as a freelancer. And there is fear of, you know, where's the next check gonna come from? But I'll tell you, this is the way I answered my father. When he asked me about that. I said, you know, dad, you lose your job right now and you're outta work. I lose a job and I've lost at most, maybe a 10th of my income. Yeah. So there's a security in the fact that, I mean, yeah, I'm only as good as I play. True, but there's a loyalty. There's still loyalty of your, your colleagues that you work with. And you have a little nest of musicians that when you get called for something, you say, Hey, you know, why don't you call so-and-so? Why don't you call this person? And it turned out like at the time when I was freelancing in Atlanta, there was a network of trumpet players. There were four of us that kind of took care of each other. One of'em ended up having a full career in the Metropolitan Opera. Another one took the route and was a full-time professor at a university. Both of those guys just retired, and they're a little bit older than I am. And then I ended up the Atlanta Symphony, then going to the Houston Symphony. There were a lot of of us that chose that as the early stages of our playing career. We started out as freelancers first, and then were able to graduate into other fields as our playing continued to improve. So, as scary as freelancing is, in some ways I would be more afraid today if my orchestra went on strike or we cease operations because when I was in the freelance world, I had an orchestra that went on strike. And even after I got in the Atlanta Symphony, I still was doing so much freelancing. I remember the orchestra went on strike for 10 weeks. It's sad to say, but, cuz a lot of people hurt, but I wasn't hurting at all during the strike. In fact, I was still putting money in savings because I freelanced a lot and I just cut back on what I was spending. So, the freelance thing is not always as scary and as bad as it first appears. I do have a few students here in Houston that are out freelancing and in the Houston area and they seem to be fine. It's just a different, it's a nonorthodox, you know, way of making a living for sure. But you'd be surprised. It's great for you. And you also learn a lot about business because you're in business for yourself and you're gonna learn about Schedule Cs on your tax return. You're gonna learn about having tax deductible experiences. Things that you can buy that are taxed deductible, that are a part of your lifestyle. You'll learn a lot about the tax code. You'll learn a lot about business and making ends meet and ways to run a business. And that's the best part to me of freelancing.
Carrie:On that note, for students who are thinking that they might wanna go that route? Are there a few classes here and there during undergrad that you think would be particularly helpful? Like taking a business class, taking some kind of PR class, marketing class? I don't know what you feel like is the most valuable if you're anticipating perhaps going in a freelance direction?
Mark:You know, it's funny that you should say that cause I hadn't even thought about this, Carrie, at all. But there was a reason in my undergrad years that I had to take some extra courses. I wanted to go to the International Trumpet Guild, and I'd been accepted to go play, I think my sophomore year of school. And we had a history professor who had a test the final that was given while we were gonna be out of town. And he was a real curmudgeon, and he would not let me take the final ahead before going to this convention. Oh. And so I had to take it when I came back and it was a discussion only test. I feel confident that I passed that test, but he had another opinion and he failed me for the course. Now, I did play well and did well at ITG, but he failed the course. Well, the way Northwestern was set up at that time, I had to take that course and pass it. But we could only take four units each semester, each quarter period. No other option other than I was gonna have to go to summer school at Northwestern or pay a fortune. And they knew that this professor had really done me wrong. And so the associate dean, he said, Mark, just go to the community college of your choice during the summer and take a couple of courses and we'll transfer'em in. Yeah. I said, great. Okay. So what did I take? I took accounting one and two. Oh. And, and I got back to school. And it turns out that there are no accounting courses at Northwestern. So I'm the only person in history that has on their Northwestern transcript accounting courses, because they only teach economics and stuff. It's a liberal arts school. But I would recommend, if you've got the opportunity to take, like basic accounting. You know, it sounds like, oh, that would be awful. It's so useful. I'm on the committees, a lot of the orchestra committees and stuff. I'm on the negotiating committee. I can read spreadsheets, I go to board meetings. And all of that was started by me taking accounting courses and getting an understanding. Yeah. Knowing like our finance director who used to be the president of Chevron technology, she always used to laugh. She said she was so blown away when Mark Hughes knew to say, well, do we have a statement of cash flows? And she's just like, what? How does he know that And it's like, well, you know, I learned how to do a P&L. I learned how to read spreadsheets and work with them. That worked great for me as a contractor. And even to this day, it's a piece of cake now because I can do all of this stuff on my phone and everything. And I love to do that on the side. But I do think students, if you're going to be a freelancer, well, no matter what you do, you need to be competent with your finances. Yeah. It's gonna be so helpful because we can manipulate things as a freelancer that most human beings never get to take advantage of. Music might not be a super high paying career, but it can be somewhat lucrative if you work things out and learn that. A lot of things that you do like when you buy a stereo system. Well, do you need a stereo system to listen to music so that you can further your craft? Well, actually you do. That's deductible. That's deductible. So you can write that off of your Schedule C. Your Schedule C income is the income that is not, you know, something that comes from your, an employer, so you don't have a w2. In other words, from that, you just get a 1099, which is just saying you made a thousand dollars, let's say, and there's no taxes taken out of it. So when you file your taxes, you're gonna owe probably almost a third of that in taxes. Well, if you can write off some of that income to something that you've purchased for you that year, you expense it. So your a thousand dollars income becomes, say,$500. You've cut your tax burden in half right there. Yeah. So you know that those are the kind of things that musicians can do. You know, you possibly, if you want to go to the hassle of having an at-home studio, which I'm sitting in right now in my home studio, which I only use for my music business. Yeah, that's, that's it. It's just a garage apartment attached to my house. and that's what I do. Well, I can write off a portion of all of my expenses. Those are the kind of things that we need to learn to take advantage of cuz if not, you're leaving money on the table. So that's that business side.
Carrie:Once you got to the point in your career where you are really aiming for principal positions in symphonies, can you talk a little bit about what it's like once you get to that level and what that audition process is? We've heard stories, oh my gosh. Went to this audition. There was over a hundred people for this one chair. And then you also hear stories about how, it's also a small world, right? you're also running into a lot of the same people. Can you talk about what that is like when you get to that point and what that process is and how you approached that at that point in your career?
Mark:Anytime you're auditioning for an orchestra this day and age, there's a tremendous amount of people that are interested in these positions. Unfortunately in this country, we overtrain the workforce and we have, you know, probably, a hundred, 150 people more seeking a job than we can hire. So, it's always kind of a frustrating thing. I mean, for positions like our second trumpet position that Rich Harris won. Here in 2018, we had 225 applicants, I believe. Oh my gosh. Yeah, just the headache of going through that many resumes is pretty difficult and we can't listen to 225 people obviously. Right. And all these people have music degrees. Most of'em are decent players. They've been trained, they're okay. Right. So how do we get to that point? Well, you know, your resumes, we try to eliminate and we're getting more and more aware of equity, diversity and inclusion. So when we see resumes now, pretty much everything is blanked out except what they've done. We don't see their names, we don't see anything. It's all been blackout. You may not know that. Probably the average person would not even be exposed to know that we do that. Not only do we have blind auditions, we have blind screening of resumes.
Carrie:Nice.
Mark:We do everything we can to make it perfectly fair. There is no other industry that I know of that goes to this, and if people still complain, that the population of an orchestra does not match society. Well, we're doing everything we possibly can without changing the standards. Right. We are doing that and you are starting to see a few more people, you know, populating orchestras, but that's because there's more people of different backgrounds, and heritages going into the field. Mm-hmm. So, which is great. If you remember, you know, you look back at history, we didn't have many women in orchestras until the 1960s when we started doing that and having screened auditions. and now most orchestras are about 50 50 when you look at them, or they're Oh, wow. Close to maybe 60 40. Mm-hmm. But I know the New York Phil Philharmonic at this point, they just reached the female population in the orchestra is over 50%. So Wow. We are making strides in that field. But what we do, when we look at these resumes we go through, and if you don't have any orchestral experience, you're probably gonna get a rejection letter. That doesn't mean you can't come. It just means it's gonna be harder. But we immediately, we're eliminating people that we don't think have an honest chance at fulfilling the requirements to be in the orchestra. We're at a major orchestra level. We're literally eliminating a lot of people that don't have any major orchestra experience. If they have major orchestra experience, we start looking at them a little more seriously, start looking at other things to see how successful we think they will be. We try to get the field down in our orchestra to be somewhere under a hundred. So we'll listen to somewhere around 80 people. Cause you can't listen to more than about 40 people a day without fatigue of ears and everything else. But we will try to keep it under a hundred if at all possible. But if you are rejected, you can always appeal. You get your teacher, let's say I've done written many of these myself, like, I know this is a young player, but this is someone who is competent and would do a very good job. Sometimes those appeals are granted and sometimes they're not. That's part of the process right away is just getting accepted to be able to go and play the audition. So when you start getting the acceptance, then you get these incredibly long list of excerpts that you need to learn and be proficient in. Most of them are standard and you've already started working on them and have probably mastered a few of those, even at the college level. Some even started doing this in high school. And when you get to the audition, it is probably one of the most scary things that you'll do in your life. So the first time out, it's all new and it's really something I wish everyone could see what it is like. It's very well run. It's not set up to be scary, it's just we've put so much of our life's work into it. Yeah, it's been, you know, six or eight minutes playing that you put so much pressure on yourself that it's so much anxiety going into it. You don't sleep very well at all the day or two before an audition. It can be very difficult, but the rewards are great if you do well. And as you start taking more and more auditions, you get where you know what is expected of you and what committees are looking for. Good teachers like, I'd like to think I am one. I try to train my students in knowing what orchestras are looking for. All musicians and major orchestras are very accomplished at playing with good rhythm. Playing with very good intonation and they have a beautiful sound on their instrument. Those are three absolutes. And I hear those three repeated all the time. I use the abbreviation for trumpet, t p t: tone, pitch time,. And those three are everything. And if you have a sort of an issue in any one of those three areas, you're gonna get the thank you very much. Yeah. You said to you pretty quickly and you get to go home and that airfare is flushed down the toilet. Right. It was a nice trip to learn that, oh, I should have used my metronome. Oh, I should have worked on my intonation. Right. That's sort of what that is like. Now, when you get into an audition though, people, especially the bigger orchestras, they run very professional auditions. It's not haphazard. You have assigned times before you even show up. You show up, you get your own private warmup room. You get told what you're gonna be playing and what order you get hand delivered. They come to your room and knock on your door and say, are you ready? You know, 10 minutes before. And then they come and get you. They walk you backstage. You may hear the last few notes of the previous person that's playing. They're ushered off and you're ushered on and you sit on the stage. And you're all alone. Except for the proctor that's on the stage. You can't talk. Usually there's even a rug or something on the stage, so we can't hear if you have on high heels or not. Oh, yeah. And people don't even, aren't even aware of that. Yeah. You know, we're sitting out in the hall with a shield in front of us, a nice, like here in Houston. We use this flexible cardboard, screen that blocks us from seeing anything but sound can come around of course, and we can hear. So we have no idea if you are a cyber borg or a human, or a female or male, black, white, green, purple, what color? We have no idea. Mm-hmm. all we are doing is we're listening for your skills. And we're listening to see if you're skilled enough to play in our orchestra. And that's it. And you play. And after you're finished, no matter what you get, thank you very much. It just depends on when the thank you very much happens. If you get through the whole list, you have to feel pretty good about yourself. That means that we were still interested to the end. Mm-hmm. it may be that we were interested enough that we still are gonna say no, but a lot of times we're interested enough that we say yes. and then you pass to the next round. And so we've gone from, let's say, 80 players down to 14. And this process repeats again. But now we can listen to you for a longer period of time. And so you may get to sort of playing for six or eight minutes. You may get to play for 12 to 14 minutes. And we listen to maybe three or four an hour. And if you're one of the lucky three or four or something, I think I've seen as many as six in finals before you get to play again for even longer. And we get to listen to even more of you. And we turn from being critics, you know, we're trying to eliminate those in that first round. We start going from being critics into cheerleaders, and you start finding people. You go like, wow, I really like this and you're wanting them to play well. You could feel the energy in the room, it changes. And we start finding people like, wow, wow. And sometimes there's a disappointment like, wow, that person faked us out, but boy, they really can't do this very well. But we don't talk behind the screen. We don't talk about candidates. Anyway, that's, that's not allowed. And until we, after we do a preliminary vote, and then we have a final vote of each person for each round. It's done very business-like all the way, and all of this is done behind a screen until the very, very end. We may have one or two players who, we advance to a section round where they get to play in the section to help us determine who maybe has the best blend with a particular section. Yeah. And then there's really not a real efficient way to do that with a screen. Right. But I assure you, if you are getting to that point, no matter if you are green and you're from the planet's lime, eventually you're gonna get a job because your standards are so high, there's gonna be an orchestra that's looking for a green person from the planet's slime. You know? Yeah. It's, yeah. It doesn't matter at that point, because you are so good. I mean, at that level, you are so good. You want these people mm-hmm. So we're just trying to find the absolute best fit for our orchestra and our needs at that point. But that's what the process is like. It can be very fatiguing. It can last over multiple days. Mm-hmm. I remember my first experience in the Atlanta Symphony audition. I'd prepared, you know, of course for weeks and weeks and weeks. And I got as sick as I've probably ever been with a stomach bug three or four days before. And I kind of thought it must be nerves. And it really wasn't. I got a really bad stomach bug and I was throwing up for a couple of days Oh, no. Enough so that I was so sore, it hurt to breathe. And I was able to postpone my audition to the last day of prelims. I think that they listened to like 125 prelims. And I probably was something, I think my number was like 117 or something like that. Yeah. And I remember playing, and, I hadn't eaten in a two or three days, so I was pretty weak. And I played around at about three o'clock in the afternoon and I passed, turns out I had a unanimous decision and I went on to the second round. which was a semi-final round at around, 7:00 PM and I played and I was so weak. I remember falling asleep on a little sofa in the room where I was warming up and practicing. Mm-hmm. I was still not well. And then, we had a final at 10:00 PM that night. Oh my gosh. And they suspended the audition at that point I made to the finals and there were three of us. And they postponed it. Not because of me, because the committee was so tired. Yeah. And they'd been listening all day long, you know, they'd been a little thing. It was incredible. So that was the three of us. And they invited us back a week later and they flew the other two guys back in. I lived locally. So we had another round of finals a week later, and I won that final. I felt much better and I had more strength and ended up winning that day. It was very interesting when you get to the point of being notified. The three finalists, we were down in a hallway in the basement of the Memorial Arts Center in Atlanta, and the music director came up to us and started reviewing us of what he heard in each of the three of us. Oh, wow. And he started out with one man who is a fabulous trumpeter these days. He's been in San Francisco, he is now principal in Toronto. Had been principal in Dallas for a while, went back to Toronto. He's one of my favorite players to listen to. He's just a fabulous player. He's younger than I am, and, he had just had a little bit of a rough go on a couple of excerpts and got rattled in the finals. that kept him from winning the job. But he's a fantastic player even to this day. And the other guy was a principal and another regional, larger regional orchestra. And had ended up staying in that job as a principal player for his whole career and just retired recently. He also played well and everything. But then the music director turned to me and he said, but for those reasons, we felt like you matched the principal player here the best. And you have a lot of promise. You still have to work on one excerpt, but you know, we're gonna give the job to you. And so that was how I was notified. And of course, that was one of the happiest days of my life. you know, you think, wow, this is like right up there with a child being born, you know? You feel like you just won the Olympics and got the gold medal. Well, in Houston, total different situation. When I came here, I auditioned, and it was not ideal in any shape or form. I was auto advanced to a semi-final because I was already an associate principal who had been acting principal for three years in Atlanta. I was highly qualified. They knew that. And it came down to semi-finals. There were probably 14, 10, 12, 14 of us that played. And we got down to four finalists. We had four finalists, and I had to play round rehearsal pianist. I was late in the semis and I was the first finalist to play and I was super fatigued. And I had been playing principal in an orchestra with no assistant for over a year. And I came here off of a really hard week of performances doing a McMillan piece, symphony number three, which had a bunch of high stuff in it the night before I was fatigued. Nothing ideal about it. I didn't play particularly well. Played okay. Had to play most of the heightened trumpet concerto in the finals and a lot of excerpts having to do over and over again. And I was dead and I didn't have much left and I didn't win. I was the runner up to someone else who won, who I didn't come here actually interested in the Houston Symphony at all. Hmm. I was using this as a warmup act for the Atlanta Symphony. My hometown orchestra had a principal opening two weeks later and I was just trying to get in shape kind of thing for competition, you know, cuz it's different than playing in the orchestra completely. It's like going to the Olympics. Well, I go back to Atlanta and I'm runner up there too, to the same guy that I was here. And that guy was Tom Hooten, who is principal in the Los Angeles Philharmonic now, and been there for about a decade. So wonderful player that I lost to there. But what ended up happening is he won both jobs. He took Atlanta thinking Atlanta was gonna be the better job. Houston calls me and offers me the chance to continue and play a one year here. Anyway, long story short, I won the job here in Houston and he was in Atlanta, but it turned out Atlanta went through a bunch of financial problems and ended up being the wrong decision for him. Really? Mm-hmm. But he was so good. He was able to continue to audition and win the principal job in Los Angeles, and he is a fabulous, fabulous player to this day. So that's how I kind of backed into the Houston Symphony job. I didn't really want this job on the onset, but it turned out to be a dream. I love it here. Love this orchestra and I'm kind of perfectly fit for this brass section. Even my best ideal, I didn't realize, you know, what I needed and I am super happy here with how it all worked out and, and how things transpired. I know of no one that loves to take auditions. It's just a necessary evil. Right. Yeah. You know it because it's as much as you want it to be musical, in so many ways, it's anything, but it's so hard to be musical in a situation when you know you're being judged. Yeah. But you know, that's part of the process and it's what we work for. We hone those skills for years to be able to do it. But, you know, they are great jobs once you get them. I mean, I have a job now that a lot of people would cut a body part off just to be able to have my job.
Carrie:For students wondering, what daily life is like? Can you give us a snapshot of kind of a typical week of being a principal player in an orchestra? And obviously you have your teaching responsibilities as well, but can you tell us just in a typical week, what does that look like for you?
Mark:Well, a typical week for an orchestra is we have four rehearsals, sometimes five and three performances. Most orchestras, by and large, you average eight services a week, and a service is about two and a half hours, unless you work with an opera company. And then it's usually longer than that, but, two and a half hours long. And that can either be a rehearsal or a performance, and like I said, they average eight a week. Some weeks you could have nine, but usually, to be all set by a seven service week. So it averages out to being eight services a week. We, and most of the orchestras that I have been in generally get Mondays are a kind of a guaranteed day off. Years ago you would get Sundays and Mondays and that was awesome, but over the years to try to maximize the amount of money that comes into an orchestra, we perform a lot of times now on Sundays, Sunday matinee a or Sunday night performances, et cetera, are so nights both. So Mondays are a guaranteed day off. And usually sometimes you'll get another day Tuesday, sometimes it might be a Friday or something that you might get off. But let's say ideally it's a Monday and a Tuesday, so I get two days off together. Wow. What does a principal trumpet player do on his off days? Guess what? I'm playing the trumpet on my off days for many hours. Now does every trumpet player in an orchestra have to do that? No, they don't. Some could even take one of those days completely off and you want to, and then you play a little bit on Tuesday, look over your music. You got two licks you're worried about, and that's sort of it. And life's not too bad at all. It's pretty good. So you have like a more normal life principal trumpet is, and principal horn I say, are the two most demanding physical jobs that there are to stay in shape, to play the repertoire. And fortunately, playing the repertoire alone will not take care of it. you've gotta do a lot of working out. And so just like a professional athlete has to do a lot of time in the gym. I do a lot of time doing exercises, flexibility exercises, strength building exercises all the time. And I can't do a full workout like that on a day if I've got a rehearsal in a concert. Yeah. If I do, I'm gonna get fried because I am not gonna have the stamina to play the performance and that's how I'm judged so that I can't do, so I end up having to front load my weeks heavily on the practice side. So I try to practice four hours or so on one of those days or both. I play a lot, so I spend a lot of time over in my practice studio, hopefully more than one set at a time. Some days I just go one. Straight set three or four hours. And then I have other things that I need to do. Of course, you know, other were times when I had children at home, had to do those kind of issues. Gotta do yard work, you gotta do housework, you gotta do other, issues of taking care of business that you may do. So your day fills up pretty quickly around it. But the most important job for me as a principal trumpet, is I've got to practice those days and be prepared, strength wise and note wise of knowing what I'm gonna do. Cause you always hear your first trumpet player, you cannot hide. So that is all part of the situation.
Carrie:How do you fit in teaching with your schedule? Does that fit in between rehearsals and performances on the other days, or how does that work?
Mark:It does. It does to some degree. A lot of times I can fit that in on Mondays and Tuesdays around my practice schedule. Mm-hmm. So when I need to, I will, let's say, on a Monday I may practice an hour and a half in the morning before going in and start teaching at 10. So I may be over here, get up at seven, which oh, I hate, but then I start practicing at eight, practice from eight to nine 30, drive over and teach from 10 to maybe three in the afternoon. Cover five students come home, grab a bite, try to relax for a second and then head back to the practice room. So it's a pretty busy day. But that's kind of what you have to do. And it doesn't sound so bad except, you know, I don't ever get a day off. Yeah. So, you know, it's one of those things. But, on a performance day, if you do the rest of it, Wednesday you have a rehearsal, or two Thursday you have a rehearsal or two doubles, which if you have a double, that's an all day, that's a eight hour day. The two of them with a lunch break in between. And then on Friday morning you would have a dress rehearsal for two and a half hours with a concert in the evening. Well, Saturday we have an evening concert. Now we may have family concerts in the morning, but not necessarily, it just depends. Then Sunday you have a matine egg, so I have Sunday nights that are kind of free mm-hmm. So it just depends. But my life is unique, but it's something I'm used to. Never boring, you know, never boring. Yeah, absolutely.
Carrie:During the pandemic, a lot of creatives, a lot of people in the arts had to shift, had to get creative in a new way, perhaps. And I know the Houston Symphony was still active in some ways. The symphony was pretty creative in some different things they did online. It didn't go completely dormant like a lot of other organizations did. But you did start doing something new during the pandemic that is related to your art. So can you tell us a little bit about what you did and how that came to be and what you're doing with it now?
Mark:Well, early in my career, there was a time when I was traveling the country as a soloist, with an organist, through Columbia Artist Management. And I toured with a trumpet organ duo around the country. And I spent a lot of times in hotels and doing a two hour trumpet organ concert, I had to be very strong. So I had to practice a lot. And practicing in a hotel without a mute is gonna get you kicked out. So Yeah, I always got used to practicing a lot with practice mutes and hotel rooms as much as enough that I could stay in shape without messing up my flow rate of air. So I always had my favorite practice mutes and the ones that I totally hated. And so during this covid break that we had, I kind of, for grants, kind of wanted to make, a practice mute. There was nothing currently on the market that I thought was great. And so I set out to make one and I kind of had a hobby. I've always been a little technical and liking to make things. And so I bought my first 3D printer, started working, developing a CAD for a practice mute that I liked the basic shape of from a previous manufacturer who was no longer in business and started making refinements to it. And so I now have four printers. In fact, right now in the background, if I'm quiet, you could probably hear the machines in the background. Wow. That's about 40 decibels of two small printers that are printing right now. And I have four, like I said. And it started a little business and I started a website and in the last year and a half, I have sold over 360 mutes, which I'm not gonna get goodness rich doing. But it's quite profitable. I mean, you know, it's worth my spare time. Yeah. And I can do this as I see fit and, and it kind of is fun for me. It's one of those stages of life thing. It gives me something new to toy with and, you know, I have scales, that I weigh my shipment. I do all of my shipping from my house. I do everything with it. I have shipped mutes as far away as Tasmania. I do not like to ship outside the Continental US, so I don't advertise that. Mostly it's just to the US but it keeps me busy. In my little bit of spare time that I have, I end up selling on average about 20 mutes a month. It's worth my while to do it. And it's kind of fun. It hasn't got to be a drag just yet, but it's enough to finance all of my other hobby, which is restoring old trumpets. Oh. And so that can get to be expensive and, getting valve jobs on antique instruments and that kind of thing. And so I've mm-hmm. managed to make money in one way of something I like to do and funnel that money to into an addiction that I have and another form of life and a lot of things here that are a deductible that I'm talking about because I've been able to ride off those machines, because it's the business. And then I invest money in these trumpets and that's also deductible. So, yeah. And I use them. I mean, I play almost all vintage instruments and the orchestra Nice. It's pretty amazing kind of thing. But that's how it all started. I had a little extra time during Covid because we were just playing mostly chamber music and Yeah. Doing that online. And so I had a lot of extra time. I wasn't doing as much teaching. So I filled my boring days with 3D printers.
Carrie:Well, and it's probably fulfilling to a certain extent, to know that you are making a product that you felt like wasn't up to your standard in the market at the time, and you were making something different, and now you feel like, now I'm giving it to other trumpet players. Right?
Mark:Oh, it's amazing. I see it on Facebook. Somebody will post a picture with them putting their, they just got my Mark Hughes practice mute, and they'll have it in their bell, and they'll take a picture put on there. And I can't tell you how proud that makes me feel. Oh, that's awesome. I've made that. Yeah, I've made that. You know, I'm taking a roll of plastic filament and turning it into something that, you know, is useful. Can't tell you how many, dozens and dozens of people have written me.
Carrie:Oh, that's great. Looking back over your journey, whether it's specific to music or not, do you have some advice for students who are somewhere in this mix, of trying to figure out what to do with their collegiate education or how to take advantage of that time? How to figure out what they wanna do with their life. Right. Do you have some advice for them, either about how you approach something or maybe looking back or even looking at your students today, what advice you would wanna share with them?
Mark:Well, the one thing I I'd share is one thing that my teacher, Vincent Cichowicz used to say, cuz you know, halfway up the mountain, it's extremely crowded in a lot of fields. It really is. Music in particular. Yeah. Especially as a performer. But really that's true of anything you've got. You're gonna have a lot of competition because people want to do what we do. I mean, it's a exciting life, but at the very top, there's still a few, and there's only been a few, and you will find your niche. And all that you can do is stay focused on getting better and being the best you can be and getting to the top of the mountain. And when you get to the top of the mountain, you'll find what it is that you want to do that makes your heart happy and hopefully find it to be something that will be lucrative enough to, that you're comfortable in life the way you want to be. Don't put unneeded anxiety about making career decisions, as much as to me, you want to be mindful of that, but really keep your focus on growth and being the best you can be. Learn whatever you can learn. Do everything you can to make yourself a better human so that you have more versatility. One thing I've learned in, in the music business is there are many, many, many ways to make a living, many ways to be happy. And I think it's very effective to keep all your options open as long as you can. And if you do that, I think you're gonna find yourself spending the rest of your career doing something that you love.
Carrie:Yeah, that is such great advice. Well, Mark, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story with everyone and giving all this great advice to students. You've always been very generous with your time with me when I've asked you to speak to students, so I really appreciate you doing that again for me today.
Mark:Thank you so much, Carrie, for thinking of me and having me on.
Carrie:Thanks, Mark.
Do you know someone I should interview? Please DM me on Instagram@pathsinprogresspodcast and let me know who I should talk to. I would love to hear about how these stories are impacting your journey. Please follow Paths in Progress wherever you download your podcasts and leave a review to let me know what you think. You can also follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn at Paths in Progress Podcast. Our music is by John Grimmett and the artwork is by Edgar Alanis. Thanks again for joining me today.
