IPSWICH -- It was tech week for the Ipswich High School play, and music teacher Michael Coelho didn’t have anywhere to rehearse the symphony orchestra.
The 120-person ensemble, which includes both string and wind players from grades 9 through 12, usually rehearses on the stage of the school’s auditorium. But while the stage was covered with sets for the school play, there was no available room in the building that was large enough to fit everyone. As many students as could fit would cram into the orchestra room, in a labyrinth of chairs and music stands.
“It is what it is,” said Coelho, taking swigs from a cup of Starbucks cold brew. “I’d rather rehearse than not.”
That they have this problem at all is a testament to the immense popularity of the music program at Ipswich High, where the student body numbers a comparatively small 482 and this year’s orchestra president, double bassist Behnji Dessources, was also last fall’s captain of the Ipswich Tigers football team. To hear the students tell it, much of that popularity has to do with Coelho, 33, who has been teaching in Ipswich for nine years.
“He loves music so much, and he shares that love with us,” said junior Addison Pillis, a violist who also serves as the orchestra’s assistant librarian.
“Everything’s always changing. We never do the same thing twice,” said senior Sarah Eliot, a cellist and the orchestra’s treasurer.
The level the students get to play at with Coelho is satisfyingly high, too, Dessources said. “We’ve had alumni come back and say they’re playing music they played in chamber orchestra two years ago, in their college orchestra.”
In December, Coelho for the second time reached the final round of nominees for the Grammy Music Educator of the Year Award, having previously made the finals for the 2022 award. Both times, he was the only teacher working in New England to reach the finals.
His first nomination rode on videos of his Zoom teaching and a collaboration the school orchestra did with Voices of Hope and Massachusetts General Hospital, which resulted in a video that helped raise more than $1.1 million for the hospital’s cancer center.
“I went to school for music education,” Coelho said. “So I’m looking up how to edit file formatting. I’m dropping off iPads at a house. I’m meeting people in the parking lot to tune their instruments.” He laughed. “It was wild. I never want to live through that again.”
For this year’s award nomination, he submitted a portfolio of three videos, one of which included several minutes of uninterrupted teaching time with Ipswich Middle School’s sixth-grade orchestra. “My colleagues were like, ‘Are you crazy?’” They recommended he show off the high school’s top orchestra, Coelho said. “I’m like, no. I want them to see what real teaching really looks like.”
Growing up in Fall River, Coelho was encouraged from an early age to pursue music. “You should really just go be a performer,” he recalled people saying. But he couldn’t ignore the pull he felt toward teaching, he said, and his fourth-grade strings teacher, Charlene Monte, set him on the track toward music education.
Now, in addition to his job at Ipswich, where he’s been orchestra director for nine years and K-12 fine arts director for one, Coelho also teaches string pedagogy online and on campus at Cambridge’s Longy School of Music of Bard College, and freelance performs when he can, on viola and violin.
“Looking back on it, I’m so fortunate Fall River had strings because so many public schools, especially in low-income areas, aren’t always privy to that,” he said.
By 10:14, the orchestra room at Ipswich was full of teenagers setting up their instruments, chatting, and running through excerpts from the pieces on the day’s agenda. A quick hush fell when Dessources and one other student reached the front of the room, and soon the orchestra is tuning to an A, ready to warm up. Dessources got up on the podium, picked up a baton, and led the orchestra through scale warmups under Coelho’s watchful eye.
“I’m using students constantly to help progress growth,” Coelho said before class, noting that when students can learn from one another, they learn more.
Once Dessources was back at his double bass and the rehearsal began in earnest, Coelho was a fountain of energy, as much a cheerleader and improv comedian as an educator. As the orchestra woodshedded phrases, he laid down a gauntlet of challenges; playing a phrase, singing it with special attention to dynamics, playing it with the same attention.
“Can I tell you something big that happened to me today? I wrote a hall pass for the first time in my life,” he quipped, giving the students a quick breather while keeping their attention focused. “I felt like a real teacher!”
The orchestra moved onto a different section of the piece, and Coelho raised a hand for quiet. “How many of you know we’re slowing down?” A few hands went up. “How many know where we’re slowing down?” Hesitant murmurs. “It’s OK. You’re allowed to make mistakes,” he said.
In a sense, Coelho is performing whenever he steps on the podium, he said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m having a really bad day. It doesn’t matter what happened to you five minutes before show time. You gotta step on stage and be that character … be the best teacher for those kids in that moment.”
Marissa Scarano, Coelho’s colleague, called him “an instructor in life,” not just in music. He teaches technical, mental, and emotional skills in the same breath, she said. “And because he believes they can meet those high standards, they do.”
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.