Louis Panacciulli was still in high school when he knew that music would be his life’s work.
He had followed the lead of his mother, Pauline, who played the piano, and his late older brother Gerry and his sister, Lisa, who started taking piano lessons ahead of him.
By the time he was in high school, Panacciulli started playing clarinet and saxophone, eventually going on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees at New York University.
These days, he teaches elementary school and college students, and conducts the Nassau Pops Symphony Orchestra in the free performances of light classical and popular music it gives in communities around Nassau County.
“Our mission is to provide free, quality concerts to people who normally wouldn’t hear a symphony orchestra,” Panacciulli said. “We’re trying to further the cause of music on Long Island and give back to the community.”
Panacciulli, 60, struck on the idea of forming the orchestra in 1983 after several years of assembling talent in community theater musicals for churches and synagogues that presented Broadway musicals for fundraising efforts. He trained the singers and assembled the orchestras that accompanied them. A musician in one of those groups remarked on how much fun it would be to put together a group that would perform regularly, and the germ of the idea was planted.
The Nassau Pops progressed from playing three concerts annually at its inception to the 15 performances it gives each year now, starting each season with a June fundraiser at Westbury Gardens to benefit North Shore University Hospital in Glen Cove.
“Many times we have a guest artist. We do a repertoire of light classical and popular,” Panacciulli said.
Two years ago, the orchestra worked with tenor Michael Amante in a concert aired on Long Island public TV station WLIW and, ultimately, 40 other public stations around the country. The orchestra also has performed with Daniel Rodriguez, the singing New York Police officer who gained some national notoriety after Sept. 11, and with Strawberry Fields, a Beatles tribute band. Last fall it performed with Martin Preston, a noted Liberace impersonator.
That range of collaborations suggests the range of the orchestra’s repertoire and the scope of Panacciulli’s own musical experience.
He also directs a 38-member Nassau Pops Wind Ensemble that he formed four years after founding the orchestra.
As a full-time music teacher at Howell Roads School in Valley Stream and an adjunct professor at Nassau Community College, conducting a symphony composed of accomplished musicians brings a particular kind of satisfaction. Many of them are public school music educators like himself, but one of the orchestra players is a dentist and its president is Dawn Manuel, director of physical therapy at St. Francis Hospital.
“You can’t really describe how you feel standing in front of such qualified musicians. You look at them and they do exactly what they want you to do,” said Panacciulli, who also is vice president and music director of the non-profit group.
The orchestra’s itinerary includes eight summer concerts, including two in Mineola’s Memorial Park, an annual fall fundraiser at the Tilles Center to benefit cerebral palsey and a winter concert at Chaminade with the Mineola Choral Singers.
But being involved in music at all levels gives Panacciulli satisfaction, starting with the fourth through sixth graders he teaches in Valley Stream.
“I’m making musicians. What better job can you have than that?,” he said, talking about the thrill he feels in introducing children to “the wonders to playing on an instrument.”
The role Panacciulli plays at Nassau Community College is directing the Community Band of Nassau County, comprised of both his students and members of the community.
“The advanced students are a different kind of satisfaction,” he said.
It’s the full panoply of his student orchestras, young and younger, along with the Nassau Pops that keeps his life filled with music, the music that first captured his imagination as an eight-year-old boy exploring the 88 keys on a piano.
