For most people who have never set foot in a band room during class, the experience can be intimidating. It’s noisy, crowded (often twice the size of a typical class) with instruments tuning, students talking, and fragments of music filling the air. Yet from this chaos, Claude Lemmer built harmony. Starting in 1961 as Shepherd High School’s band director, Lemmer would spend the next 37 years shaping not only a music program but generations of young people.

Lemmer possessed a rare gift: amid the jumble of sounds, he could instantly pick out a single wrong note. “That’s a B-flat over there, let’s fix it,” he’d call out, his ear trained to perfection. He also had the extraordinary ability to look at a sheet of music and not only hear in his mind how it was written, but how he wanted it to so

See Full Page