Bellmore-Merrick's Renaissance musician

Fourth in a series on Bellmore-Merrick students of the arts.

At age 14, Mepham High School freshman and aspiring violist Joshua Corwin has already performed on a number of the New York metropolitan area’s great stages, including the Tilles Center on the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University in Brookville and Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan.

And if Joshua’s score on his New York State School Music Association solo last spring is any indication, he may very well be headed for concert halls around the world. Performing the third movement of Czech composer Carl Stamitz’s Viola Concerto in D Major — at Level VI, the competition’s highest difficulty level — he earned a perfect score of 100.

“It was a lot of practice,” he said.

His success at NYSSMA over the years is one of many reasons that Joshua has been selected to perform with the Nassau County Music Educators Association’s All-County orchestra and the Long Island String Festival orchestra every year since fifth grade, and the Metropolitan Youth Orchestra since sixth grade. In May he was one of 21 Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District eighth- and 12th-graders honored by the Bellmore-Merrick Cultural Arts Council at a ceremony at the Marriott in Uniondale.

Now the Bellmorite is trying to decide whether to eventually pursue a career as a professional musician or as an engineer. And that is no easy decision for a young man with interests — and talents — as varied as his.

He could have attended a prestigious music camp this summer, likely on scholarship, but he chose not to. Instead he served as a counselor-in-training at Coleman Country Day Camp in Merrick, where he had been a camper from age 7 until this year. Marcia Miller of Merrick, his viola teacher and a strings instructor in the Merrick Elementary District, said that Joshua used to come to his lessons from camp in his tan-and-red Coleman shirt, sweaty and often a little muddy.

Joshua said he loves the Coleman experience, and at least for the time being, he couldn’t see himself spending his summers in any other way than at Coleman, where archery and computers are his favorite activities.