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Our world: If the music fits.

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If you ask Barron Collier High School band director Kelly Parker what the true test of a music teacher is, she might surprise you: Pairing the right instrument with the right student, she says. When you are in charge of a small musical army, these relationships can make the difference between making beautiful music and just plain noise.

“Personalities are often well matched,” she says. “Like Tiger Woods playing golf. What if Tiger Woods hadn’t found golf? The sport found him. I think music is the same way.

And the measure of the fit? The sheet music will tell you whether you have done it correctly.

• The flute players are very meticulous in the notes they make, Parker says. They turn in their music all pressed and perfect. All of the pencil marks are off. They prepare it to be turned back in because they are meticulous people.

• What the trumpet players hand in, though, is a little different. Tattered. Ripped in half. You can’t play trumpet without being a pretty aggressive personality, she explains. “And no one works to play third trumpet. They want to play first trumpet. So the music is ripped in half because the musicians have been fighting over it.”

• The saxophone players, they have dirty jokes written across the top of everything, Parker says. “They have humor about what they do.”

• “The French horn players are ever esoteric, ever melancholy,” Parker says. They often have a statements written across the top of their music. Something like “all is in sequence and balance between God, man and the universe.” They’re always intelligent, she says, but always in touch with some other strata.

• Then there’s the percussion players. You never get the music back from them because they lose everything. “I only have one drumstick. I can’t play ... ’cause I got one stick.”

• “The euphonium players, they’re special,” Parker says. “They have a marriage of the qualities of all the other players. If they are serious about their craft, they are meticulous; they have ownership; they put their name on their things; they don’t lose anything; they have funny jokes to make; they’re in touch with another strata.

“They almost have their own secret society. They have a fraternity between them unlike any other instrumentalist or single instrument. They have euphonium conventions, they have euphonium literature. I would compare them to like people who love to do math. You knew people in school who loved to do that — just loved to do math.”

Freshman George Lanoszka, 14, (pictured playing the baritone, the euphonium’s fraternal twin, last August in a BCHS marching band practice) said that the thing that binds the players together is that they are all different.

“There isn’t a baritone stereotype. Whatever doesn’t fit into the other groups, that is who fits into the baritone group,” he said.