Henry Brown’s celebrating consisted of a cruise down Interstate 90 and a few scoops of peanut butter and cookie dough ice cream.

It was dinner for the young saxophonist, on his way home from Ellensburg, where he had just been named the top tenor in the state at the Washington Music Educators Association competition.

He was happy when he found out, clustered in a pavilion at Central Washington University with his parents, his band director and his Bainbridge High classmate Shelby Sundquist, who took home second place, late Saturday night.

He was especially happy because it had been a really weird day.

Brown went straight to his designated performance venue, a random classroom in a technology building, just before 9:30 a.m. He had sequestered himself in a practice room all morning, wanting nothing to mess with his mindset, but now it was time to play.

The sophomore had 10 minutes to warm up, tune his instrument and wow three judges with his piece, two movements from James di Pasquale’s “Sonata.”

He had taken a risk, flipping the movements: first two, then one. He thought this order was more stately. At districts, he had played the movements in their assigned order, in reverse, but a judge had wondered why.

“Playing one and then two sort of leaves a question at the end,” Brown explained, agreeing.

But these were different judges and he couldn’t anticipate how they would respond. They could ding him points, taking issue with the inaccuracy. It could go either way.

Usually, scores come quickly. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes after you play. You pick them up at a table.

But Brown’s scores didn’t come at all. He checked three times, waiting two hours in between. He was mostly calm; the delay could be a good thing.

“I thought maybe they were deciding between a couple of people and still looking at their notes,” he said.

Brown had been drilling through this repertoire for nine months, practicing up to six hours everyday between zero period, when jazz band meets, fifth period, his independent study, after-school and during lessons with his private instructor, Dave Carson. When he started preparing in July, he was just trying to get the notes down. In more recent months, he focused on musicality.

He was a long way from “Yankee Doodle,” the subject of his first jam session, which he taught himself to play by ear.

Ralph Burton, the music instructor at Sakai, lugged bold brass, snares and a bevy of woodwind-types for the Wilkes fourth-graders to sample, but Brown only had eyes for the sax. His dad had one sitting around the house — he had played in high school — so it was a natural affinity.

Brown was motivated by rapid improvement when he started private lessons, and the train of ones he received at districts in the seventh and eighth grade for superior performances didn’t hurt either.

“It’s kind of motivating just to sound good and play really good, fun pieces,” he said of his discipline and training.

At 2 p.m., the top three lists were posted — for nearly every category but Brown’s. There was a rumor going around that there had been a problem with the judging; some kid had tried to debate his scores. Sundquist, unhappy with hers, had already headed home.

Brown — whose scores were finally tracked down sometime after 3, stuffed in the multiple percussion folder — had a similar reaction.

“There were some negative comments,” he said. “Not a whole lot. But it didn’t seem like I had won.”

Both students were wrong, and Sundquist was retrieved from a gas station in Cle Elum, just in time for the award ceremony.

Other Spartans also fared well at state. The Bainbridge Saxophone Quartet, composed of Brown, Sundquist, Kevin McCann and Taylor Lhamon, placed third place in the Small Woodwinds Ensemble category. Hayden Tutty, Sarah Jung and Erik Appleberry received honorable mentions for solos on flute, violin and tuba.

See Henry Brown play

Henry Brown was invited to join the “Elite Eight,” a group of high school students who placed at state, at the 10 Grands performance at Benaroya Hall (7 p.m. Saturday, May 14). He will perform a selection from di Pasquale’s “Sonata.”

As a finalist in the Young Artist Competition, he was selected to play Glazunov’s “Concerto in E Flat Major” on the alto sax with the Bremerton Symphony Orchestra (4 p.m. Sunday, May 22). He will also play the tenor saxophone part in Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky.