this started out being a college essay about someone that influenced you--not sure what it is now. a love letter, haha.

Ms Hernandez cuts our high school Concert Band off mid-measure, pauses, searching for exactly the right words. "Play it like... like you're shaking bees in your hands."
Weirdly enough, we know exactly what she means. The next run, when we play it, is more soft, rhythmic, sustained-- maybe even the quiet buzzing of rattling bees. If I have a thousand days of band under my belt, I have a thousand metaphors tucked in my pockets. I can tell you which passage of Variations on a Korean Folk Song should be played like you're "painting with rollers"; which phrase in Sundance should be "tossed like air mattresses across a volleyball net being stabbed with fencing swords", which notes in Komm Susser Tod have to be played "like pillows"-- solely from Ms Hernandez's endless efforts to get us beyond the written-on-the-page music. Her metaphors and stories can be my-ribcage-is-collapsing funny, but they also connect music to my everyday life-- when I look at people painting, I hear the musical expression in each stroke; when I hear the bus is coming, I distractedly harmonize in my head. After a long day of rehearsal, it seems like every sound is a part of a chord, the beginning of a song-- something to tell me what the world is one more time, when words fail.
When Ms Hernandez gets us to concentrate our ADD minds on a piece, we get beyond ourselves. For minutes at a time, we are not high school students or teenagers or even individuals-- we are performers. I've started seeing changes in everyone in band-- because she has this expectation of us. I vividly remember one day in junior year: I had signed up to be the narrator of my school's drumline show. "Emily! You're saying every line like you're apologizing for something! Bring out your inner power bitch! Yeah? Is she in there?" She sighed, frustrated but hopeful.
I sighed, doomed.
Or maybe not. Over the next couple of rehearsals, I started pretending I had the unadulterated, fearless passion Ms Hernandez unfailingly brought to the podium. I brought out the power bitch-- some strutting instead of shuffling, some declarations instead of questions. Even if the confidence only lasted until I got offstage, it was a strange kind of high. The way I went through life, I tried a little of everything and hid my lack of self-respect behind my mediocrity. Band-- Ms Hernandez-- is changing that for me. Band, orchestra, drum line-- doing music in high school is the most focused effort I've put into anything. It became something I could take pride in, something I could both claim and belong to.
When I came to Palisades, I played a dingy french horn that had previously been rusting underwater from an ancient shipwreck (and sounded twice as bad with me playing). I feel in retrospect that it was a pretty good representation of the band program. Two years later, Ms Hernandez had basically birthed (not a word I use lightly) a new program, with kids who were motivated to be in band and create music. She garnered enough community and administration support to buy two like-new absolutely beautiful french horns. But I'm no finalized result, no "full-circle moment" of a person-- I know I have forever to go, infinity to learn. Somehow, that's more exciting than intimidating-- I know Ms Hernandez will be there urging me to feel more and play more, exaggerate the highs and the lows, the pianos and the fortissimos.