Schermerhorn played the trumpet with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Kansas City Philharmonic among several other orchestras. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and in 1953, while serving in Germany, he was assigned to be the conductor of the U.S. Seventh Army's Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. This was his first conducting position and he proved to be quite successful, winning the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medal and the Harriet Cohen International Music Award for young conductors. After leaving the Army, Schermerhorn studied and played under Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood. At Tanglewood Schermerhorn won the Serge Koussevitzky Memorial Conducting Award for two consecutive years. Later in life, Schermerhorn served again under Bernstein as the assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic. In 1957, Schermerhorn was appointed to the position of music director of the American Ballet Theatre. He served in this position until 1968, and then again from 1982-1984. Schermerhorn, however, did conduct the 1977 television production of The Nutcracker, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gelsey Kirkland, and the American Ballet Theatre. He also conducted other ballets that Baryshnikov appeared in during the 1970s, such as Twyla Tharp's Push Comes To Shove. Schermerhorn was music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra from 1963 to 1965. In 1968, Schermerhorn became the music director and conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. During his time there he was awarded the Sibelius Medal in 1979 from the Finnish government for his outstanding performance of works by Jean Sibelius. Schermerhorn joined the Nashville Symphony Orchestra as music director and conductor in 1983. The Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville, Tennessee, is named in his honor. The name of the Symphony Center was announced before his death. Schermerhorn was also the music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra between 1984 and 1988. He helped improve the orchestra's quality and made several recordings with the orchestra; most notably, he conducted the orchestra on its debut 1986 tour of the People's Republic of China, which featured soloists Stephanie Chase and Li Jian and garnered worldwide media attention. Schermerhorn was a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.
Schermerhorn had a son, Stefan Schermerhorn, and two daughters, Veronica Chasanoff and Erica Ancona. He had a long-term relationship with Martha Rivers Ingram, a billionaire businesswoman and philanthropist. Schermerhorn died on April 18, 2005 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center after a brief battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. His ashes are buried in the base of the statue "The Flutist" in the garden of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, in Nashville, Tennessee.
