Hofstra alums to play free concert celebrating late Farmingdale High School band director Gina Pellettiere

Late one night this week in the rehearsal space of Hofstra University’s Joseph G. Shapiro Family Hall, 100 or so student and alumni musicians worked through the piece they will soon perform to celebrate the life of Gina Pellettiere.

Many of the alums, like Pellettiere, attended Hofstra in the late 90s and early aughts, then scattered to teach in school music departments on Long Island and in Connecticut. On this night they sat again in the chairs they’d vacated years before and ran through the piece. Again. Again. Again, for an hour and a half.

"Trumpets, a little more presence!" shouted David Soto, the university’s band director. "More rhythmic, but still singing ... Land the downbeat a little quicker!"

Pellettiere, 43, taught music in the Farmingdale district for close to two decades and led Farmingdale High’s marching band. She was killed Sept. 21, 2023, along with retired district educator Beatrice Ferrari, 77, when the bus carrying them and 40 students to band camp in rural Pennsylvania crashed on Interstate 84 near Wawayanda, in upstate Orange County.

On May 3, at Hofstra’s Toni and Martin Sosnoff Theater, John Cranford Adams Playhouse, the university’s Symphonic Band and Wind Ensemble and about 50 alumni musicians will play a free concert featuring "Eternal Trailblazer," a new musical composition celebrating Pellettiere’s love of music and teaching.

Pellettiere’s family, including her 4-year-old son, Joseph, and her parents, Diane and Joseph, will attend.

"It’s such an honor they’re bestowing on my daughter," Diane Pellettiere said in a phone interview this week. "She loved these people. ... Going back and forth with their thoughts and putting everything together to make something beautiful — I would always tell her, she has such a beautiful job making music, how much better can it be?"

In Long Island’s band world and in Farmingdale, Pellettiere was a fixture. The marching band she led is one of the largest in the region, with close to 300 members, playing at football games, band festivals and Main Street parades. Farmingdale High regularly sends high-level musicians to New York State School Music Association auditions and festivals.

In the months after the crash, marching bands from across the country and Long Island pizzerias helped fundraise for the Daler band and the families of Pellettiere and Ferrari. Former Jets coach Robert Saleh wore a Farmingdale shirt at a team news conference a week after the crash.

New music to honor band teacher's life

The new music grew out of work by Molly Tittler-Ingoglia, a bandmate of Pellettiere’s who teaches music at W.T. Clarke High School in East Meadow. She assembled a consortium of 20 schools and band associations to commission a piece by Hollywood orchestrator Rossano Galante, whose work Pellettiere often played with her students.

Farmingdale High’s Wind Ensemble performed “Trailblazer’s” world premiere in February.

Galante has taken memorial commissions before. "It’s not easy," he said in a phone interview. "I don’t know them, but I’ll have the person who contacts me describe their personality." He asked Tittler-Ingoglia for a list of words and phrases that describe Pellettiere. The list he got included, in part: larger than life, life of the party, funny, passionate, unapologetically herself and trailblazer, the word that inspired the title.

"I liked that word," Galante said. "I wanted to give her an energetic piece."

A "heroic-sounding" opening builds to a "fast middle section — zany, topsy-turvy, it sounds like a circus," Tittler-Ingoglia said. "She was that person." The piece also includes a solo for trumpet, Pellettiere’s favorite instrument, though she knew her way around 20. "It’s kind of known as the loudest instrument in the band," Tittler-Ingoglia said. "It gets all the melodies, all the solos."

Several of the alums said they had played before at funerals or memorial concerts for family members and students. "When I was younger, I was more like a machine and the emotions would come out after," said Jennifer Iovino, the Garden City Middle School band director, in a phone interview. "Now I am thinking about the person, their life, the times we had and the sadness."

She said it felt right to honor Pellettiere with music. Music was how they met, a through-line for their friendship, and Gina’s career proved that music could be not just a passion but a livelihood. "I looked up to her," Iovino said. "She got a job right out of school, got a Mustang." Later, when they were both teaching, they listened to jazz together at Dizzy’s in Manhattan. They attended music workshops in Colorado and Chicago. "We were taking classes but also getting to explore new places," Iovino said.

At the rehearsal, Matt Holmgren, who grew up in Levittown and now teaches music in Trumbull public schools in Connecticut, said he and Pellettiere became friends during five-hour rehearsals when they were Hofstra students. After graduation, they saw each other at TubaChristmas, a Rockefeller Center festival that has for decades drawn lovers of the largest brass instrument.

"It was once a year but it was kind of like family who live apart," Holmgren said. "As soon as you see them, you pick up where you left off." Holmgren said he would probably get nervous before the concert. The music, he said, is "is not just notes on a paper. It’s an aspect of somebody’s character."

Kelsey DeMaria will play the trumpet solo in the May concert. The Hofstra freshman trumpeter studied under Pellettiere for four years at Farmingdale High School, as did her siblings. "I’m a little nervous, but I’m so honored to be able to play this for her," she said.

DeMaria said she had good memories of her teacher: meeting her for the first time when she was just 8 and telling Pellettiere she was learning trumpet, horsing around at band camp, the updates that Pellettiere gave later, when she became a mother, of little Joseph’s milestones.

Coping with the loss

Farmingdale High music band directors Matthew DeMasi and David Abrams, both Hofstra alumni, might play in the May concert. DeMasi, in an interview, said the raw grief his students felt after Pellettiere’s death had faded.

“A lot of the sadness has gone away,” he said. “When we talk about Gina, it’s the funny, lighthearted moments that either students or teachers will bring up.” And, he said, “Already, we have freshmen in the school and in the program that didn’t work with her directly. Sure, they knew of her, and about the accident … but we already see that disconnect. If you’re telling a story in a mixed group, they listen respectfully, [but] these are memories of someone they didn’t know.”

Her son lives with his grandparents. "We’re coping as best we can," Diane Pellettiere said, but "he’s missing out on a fabulous mother."

Joseph remembers his mother and sometimes talks about her. The family never knew where Gina Pellettiere got her talent, but Joseph seems to have inherited some of it, Diane Pellettiere said.

They take him to Jazz at Lincoln Center and to the same music class his mother took him to when he was an infant. Last Saturday, Joseph and his fellow toddler musicians played the bongo drums during their music class.

Diane Pellettiere said she'd heard a recording of "Trailblazer." "It was her," she said. "She would be saying, 'Oh yeah, this is good. You did a good job.' "