MASH Band Plays A Perfectly Imperfect "A+"

Amelia Matthews and Adrianiz Lopez Martinez, both seventh graders at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Seventh grader Amelia Matthews listened closely. A trombone began its long slide into a march, and then seemed to abandon it halfway. A clarinet squeaked as if it had suddenly hit puberty, and a few listeners sat up straighter in their seats. A flute whistled an off note. Matthews, lifting her sax to her lips, contemplated the task ahead of her. She took a breath and closed her mouth around the reed. Then she played a note in error.   

That is, deliberate error, without which the piece would not be complete.

Last Wednesday, that sound came to Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School (MASH), as the seventh- and eighth-grade band delivered a surprising, delightful, and at times cheeky masterclass in listening during the school’s spring concert. As they took on the composition “A+,”  by Director of Yale Bands Tom Duffy, students reminded the audience that harmony is a group project—and that the arts can be a tool in reaching it.

It comes at a time when 29 New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) arts teaching jobs, and over 100 student-facing positions, are on the chopping block due to a $16.5 million budget shortfall.

“We as musicians, we have to work so hard to be as perfect as possible, because when we make mistakes, even if it’s just one mistake, it’s noticeable," said band director Marissa Iezzi, who teaches and supports over 100 students in her role. “We have to be that much more precise in music than you have to be in some of your other subjects. That’s what I really love about this piece … and we had a lot of fun with it, too.”

To understand the mistakes—and why they are so important—is to understand the piece itself, played Wednesday alongside works by Gustav Holst and John Williams. First written by Duffy in 1998, “A+” comprises three parts: a “precise” prelude, followed by a march played with care and precision, and then the same march played anew, but with one intentional error from each musician.

In the prelude, instruments sound a little like they are still tuning, so much so that it’s kind of “a mush,” Iezzi said. Even then, students are already listening to each other: they learn when to come in and when to step back out, when to improvise and when to scrupulously study the notes in front of them. They learn to communicate, often through a language that requires no words at all.

Marissa Iezzi leads warmups in the school's cafeteria. 

It sets the stage for the march, which is neat, pomp-kissed and heraldic. As a carpet of percussion rolls out beneath the instruments, horns fall into line, full-lunged and succinct. Woodwinds join in, the bounce in their step almost audible. The march grows slow, quiet for just a moment, and it's a chance for each section to shine in its own time. Then it works its way rapidly toward the end. For a moment, it seems like the piece could be over.

But then musicians pause, and take up the march again. This time, each is afforded one mistake—“and you’re probably gonna hear it!” Iezzi said to laughs Wednesday—causing the melody to wobble, then go a little off the rails. Horns wail. Trumpets belch and clarinets shriek. Notes get cut short, or go too long, as if someone has a pedal pressed down to stretch them out. Drums momentarily forget what rhythm is. The work falls into chaos, then picks right back up.

“Because of math, that one mistake is still going to be an A+,” Iezzi explained. “It’s going to be a 99 percent. But that 99 percent in music is still not good enough, because those mistakes are so audible. They’re so noticeable.”

As young musicians started in on the prelude Wednesday, woodwinds tittered and talked, weaving in and out of each other. The bird-boned sound of the bassoon drifted over the stage. Drums rang out; horns entered languidly, as if they were moving in slow motion. If a person closed their eyes, it was possible to imagine that the group was just tuning, still in the early stages of a performance.

And then, Iezzi’s feet began to tap. The baton, balanced in her right hand, seemed to bounce; percussion rolled in. A cymbal clanged, and horns swirled around it. Clarinets jumped on board, bright and woody; flutes added wisps of sound. The piece strode forward, students in lockstep with each other. Iezzi’s baton flew through the air, then slowly came to a halt. As the audience started to clap, she held up two fingers, as if to say, Wait for it.

“We’re gonna make some mistakes!” she cried, turning towards the audience from her podium. A few laughs rippled through the house. This time, the march began with the same precision and momentum, as if students were afraid to mess up.

Then something quacked, as if someone had snuck a kazoo on stage. Drums fumbled, then recovered. Something went awry in the horn section, and the audience laughed. This was a little touch of disorder, right on time.

At the school, a brick building that rises theatrically off Fountain Street, it was just one of the ways that listening took center stage, from compositions by John Williams and Randall Stanridge to fourth grade students who delivered ebullient, vivid covers of “Roar,” “Cradle Song” and “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands.”

On stage and atop the school’s risers, some students transformed the gym into a spaceship, carrying families to the planets and back with Stanridge’s “Starfire Fanfare.” In choir, they rolled the clock back to the Fugees (soloist Adrianiz Lopez Martinez referred to the 1990s and early 2000s as “old school” in an interview before the concert), then made the room holy with “Ave Maria.”

When they closed out the night with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” long recognized as the Black National Anthem, it seemed like the whole room sang along.

“We’re making memories,” Music Director Elisangela Ortiz had said earlier in the evening, and the words rang true.

Even before that triumph, a sense of mentorship defined so much of the night. Just past 6 p.m., band students milled around the cafeteria in their neat slacks and button-down shirts, comparing last-minute notes and asking each other for advice before warmups. Their voices rose and fell, a loud hum that quieted only for attendance and warmups.

In between, Edie Stoehr asked Iezzi if they could go over something in John Williams’ “Imperial March.” Anthony Akambe assembled his bassoon and checked in with classmates all at the same time. Amelia, who picked up the sax in fourth grade at Barnard Environmental Magnet School, calmed her nerves by going over the piece in her head. After weeks of rehearsal, she was ready. 

“It’s fun!” she said when asked how she likes playing in the band. “It’s a way to, like, express myself. Band teaches us that musicians are always a step ahead of people.”

“I’m really excited to show my parents what I’ve worked so hard for,” chimed in Adrianiz Lopez Martinez, a seventh grader who’d been tapped as the soloist on’ “Killing Me Softly.” “My voice is pretty strong.”   

Around them, high school mentors arrived to help out. A freshman at Hill Regional Career High School, Lana Arrifaei held her flute gingerly in one hand, and studied a copy of “A+” with the other. Before Career—where there is no arts programming—Arrifaei spent years learning the flute under Iezzi. She’d returned to help students including her younger brother, Abdul Aziz, make it through the show.

“Being in the band gave me insight,” she said. Because Career doesn’t have a band program, she’s been rehearsing at home after school. “It’s like learning another language.”

Nearby, Wilbur Cross High School senior Justin Nohpal Perez scanned the room for  any familiar faces. After hearing about MASH from his own band director, Eric Teichmann, he’d jumped onboard.

Six years ago, a mentor in his own life—Dan Kinsman, then teaching at Fair Haven School—inspired him to take up the clarinet. Now, as he gets ready for college, he’s trying to do that for the next wave of band students. “I just do it for fun,” he said. “I want to keep playing.”

At the front of the cafeteria, Iezzi called warmups, and the room fell to a surprising hush. “Your instrument should be up, ready to play!” she said, with a kind of firmness that still managed to be kind (in an hour of ear-splitting middle school antics before the show, she did not raise her voice once). “Concert B-flat scale!”

The room, on cue, exploded into music. Trumpets held the note. Trombones sputtered into being and joined them. Woodwinds joined in, the clarinet hoarse and throaty beside the wispy, ethereal flute. It wasn’t perfection, but it was close.    

Anthony Akambe, an eighth grader at MASH who recently played with the New Haven Chamber Orchestra (NHCO). 

Iezzi, who has taught for 18 years and led the band at James Hillhouse High School from 2013 to 2018, later noted how proud she was of the students. In her classes, she folds in some of the same music she once expected her high schoolers to play. She also loves middle school, she said, because she gets the chance to introduce many students to their first instrument. She asks them to rise to the challenge because she knows that many of them will continue with band in high school.

“I push my students hard,” she said in a text message after the concert. “We drill scales and chromatics regularly, and at this year’s concerts, the seventh and eighth grade band performed some of the same pieces I once programmed with my high school ensemble … it was incredibly rewarding to see middle school students rise to that level, and they delivered.”