Corinne Williamson is a CWU music education major student who has just made history by being the first CWU student to win the Undergraduate Solo National Trumpet Competition in Kingsville, Texas.  

Williamson won in the Vincent Bach Undergraduate Solo Division with a reward prize of $3,000. The competition consists of nine total sections representing trumpet players in secondary and higher education around the nation.

Williamson cites her older sister as her biggest inspiration for starting music. “She was a flute player in middle school, and her best friend at the time was a trumpet player,” Williamson said. “And so they would come after school all the time. And I was getting ready to go into sixth grade and I was thinking if I wanted to be in a band or not. And my sister’s friend was like you should play the trumpet. And so she let me try out her trumpet and gave me a couple of lessons and I just fell in love with it.” 

When Willamson was participating in the national championship, she was up against 70 other trumpet players. “We were competing against the best of the best,” Williamson said. She chose the song “Concerto” for trumpet and orchestra by William Lovelock. 

Willamson describes this song as a pretty obscure piece of music that she had first learned about from John Harbaugh, her trumpet teacher. However, what really drew Williamson to this piece of music was the slow lyrical sections. She described the song as having “beautiful; melodic material that kind of almost sounds like a folk song.” 

Williamson practiced the song every day for nine months up until April 11, when she played it at the competition. For further practice, she even played the song at her senior recital in November of last year, with the full amount of practice culminating at around eight months. 

“Musicians are their own worst critics,” Williamson said. “It’s kind of tricky. I mean, I think because as a practicing musician, you hear yourself every day. And you never really hear the final product in the way that you want it to be. And it’s always perfect inside our heads, but it’s not always perfect outside of our head.” 

This is Williamson’s senior year at CWU. She’s going into elementary musical education, where she will be teaching elementary students how to play different instruments. Williamson advised  future music students to learn how to set musical goals for themselves so they can improve. Williamson stated that she can’t stress enough how important it is for musicians “to be humans before they are musicians, that way you can pour your heart into music.”