About

Diego Hernandez is a multifaceted, emerging conductor with a passion for bringing people of diverse talents together to do great things for the community. He was recently named a National Finalist for the 2024 American Prize in Orchestral Conducting (community division) and in Orchestral Programming (non-professional division). He is currently the conductor of the Northwestern Philharmonia, a campuswide orchestra for students at Northwestern University, a graduate assistantship position he holds as a master’s student in Orchestral Conducting at Northwestern.

Before coming to Northwestern in the fall of 2023, Diego served for three years as the first-ever Music Director of the Googler Orchestra (a community orchestra of Google/Alphabet employees), a volunteer position he held alongside his job as a Software Engineer at Google in San Francisco. At the Googler Orchestra, Diego cemented the orchestra's status as a pillar of Google's unique company culture. He raised the artistic standard of the orchestra and vastly expanded and diversified its repertoire, leading to the orchestra being named a National Finalist in the 2024 American Prize in Orchestral Performance (non-collegiate division). He fostered musician leadership; increased the orchestra's annual number of performances and grew its audience; led performances for numerous company-wide and senior leadership events at Google; and pioneered its educational programming. Under Diego’s direction, the orchestra collaborated in performance with Brian Hinman from the GRAMMY Award-winning vocal group Chanticleer, as well as the Google Choir; and delivered special performances for Guinness World Records, Google's Cloud Next conference, and the music education nonprofit Music for Minors.

Diego's conducting experience spans several genres and over a dozen organizations. Ensembles he has conducted in performance include the Eastern Festival Orchestra, the Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra, Stanford Light Opera Company (in adaptations of three Mozart operas), the Stanford Wind Symphony during its 2018 European tour, and the Stanford Summer Symphony (as its Assistant Conductor for three summers). He is in increasing demand as a guest conductor, having performed with the Orchestra of the Ukrainian National Choir of California (for a concert in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco), the Daly City All-Stars Concert Band, the Awesöme Orchestra Collective, Northwestern’s Special K (a musical run by students at the Kellogg School of Management), the Google Choir, the Stanford Saxophone Choir, and others.

Diego graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in Music and a Concentration in Conducting, and a Master of Science in Computer Science with a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction. Diego’s conducting teachers at Stanford were Anna Wittstruck, Stephen Sano, and Paul Phillips. In his master’s program at Northwestern, Diego is studying with Donald Schleicher. In 2024, Diego was a Conducting Scholar at Eastern Music Festival, where he collaborated and studied with Gerard Schwarz, Grant Cooper, and José-Luis Novo. He received additional instruction at conducting workshops from Jason Fettig, Donald Hunsberger, Larry Rachleff, Mark Scatterday, Donald Schleicher, Markand Thakar, Michael Votta, and others.

Diego is passionate about empowering ensemble musicians to connect fully with the music they are creating—an interest that extends beyond strictly conducting. His approach to ensemble musicmaking is strongly influenced by the writings of Paulo Freire and their implications for music education, about which topic Diego wrote a paper which earned an Honorable Mention from Stanford’s Boothe Prize for Excellence in Writing. In addition, Diego has served as a co-leader of the conductorless Stanford Collaborative Orchestra, in which he helped organize and empower student performances of, among other works, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony and Phillip Glass’ Glassworks—the latter as part of a collaborative performance with Bent Spoon Dance Company in Bing Concert Hall.

Diego is an active proponent of music education, having had many of his formative musical experiences in the band programs of public schools in his hometown of Tallahassee, Florida. In 2023, Diego joined the Board of Trustees of Music for Minors, a Bay Area nonprofit whose mission is to nurture in children a lifelong love of music. In addition, Diego designed and conducted the Googler Orchestra’s first-ever education concerts: one which introduced an audience of hundreds of children in Music for Minors programs, and their family members, to orchestral music; and another entitled “The Orchestra, Reverse-Engineered,” which explored, for an audience of Google employees, the inner workings of orchestral music through live performance, explanation, and audience participation.

Apart from conducting, Diego is a freelance clarinetist who, in addition to extensive orchestral and chamber music experience, has performed as a soloist with the Northwest Florida Symphony Orchestra. He plays a Buffet R13 clarinet presented to him as the Stanley Drucker Award—a clarinet hand-picked by Drucker—for outstanding musicianship at the Buffet Crampon USA Summer Clarinet Academy. Diego's clarinet teachers included Mark Brandenburg, Jeffrey Brooks, Lauren Cox, and Julie Detweiler, with additional instruction at summer programs from Ixi Chen, Shawn Copeland, Stanley Drucker, Daniel Gilbert, Jonathan Gunn, Andre Moisan, Douglas Moore-Monroe, Lynn Musco, and others.

Photo credits: Natalie Gaynor (home page), Melanie Turlington (video thumbnail on Media page)