At his request, there is no public service for Nedo Pandolfi, who died Monday at 80.

Journal file photo

When word got around Glocester and Foster that Daniel Coyne would replace the legendary Nedo Pandolfi as music director at Ponaganset High School, a friend of Coyne’s called him up.

“You know,” the friend told him, “you’re the bravest person I know.”

The year was 1996 and Pandolfi, then 67, had performed the coda of his 37-year teaching career by taking the school’s wind ensemble to Vienna, Austria, where the ensemble won first place in the prestigious international youth music festival. First place to a collection of 45 public school musicians from a small place in the smallest of states.

But Pandolfi, a short, bespectacled man with a raspy voice and an intolerance for mediocrity, knew how to draw the clearest note from every musician. In return, he inspired deep devotion among generations of students, many of whom are mourning the passing of their teacher this week.

Pandolfi died in his Manville home on Monday. He was 80 years old. At his request, there have been no public services, which has saddened, though not surprised, many of his old students.

“He never wanted to be in the limelight,” recalled Elizabeth Gates, of Glocester, who graduated from Ponaganset High School in 1973 and went on to play the French horn for the Rhode Island Philharmonic. “I can remember when they renamed the auditorium for him at the high school. You could just tell how difficult it was for him to be up in front of a group … It was the music that was important to him.”

Pandolfi, a Rhode Island native, graduated of the New England Conservatory of Music and began his career as a professional orchestra musician. He held principal trumpet positions in the Florida Symphony and the National Symphony of Montevideo, Uruguay. He was also principal horn player for the Rhode Island Philharmonic from 1965 until his retirement from performance in 1984. He arrived at Ponaganset in 1960, the year the school opened.

It was through teaching, he once said in a Journal story, that he gained much of his satisfaction as a musician.

“He was my hero, my mentor,” said Coyne, who also studied privately under Pandolfi and admits to being more than a little daunted by the challenge of replacing him. “The man had more integrity than almost anybody I ever knew. He was what I wanted to be like. He was the person I wanted to copy and I did my best to do that.”

Year after year, the blunt-talking Pandolfi, who preached discipline and teamwork at practices, who had no patience with tardiness and was frugal with individual praise, led the school’s concert band, wind and jazz ensembles to regional and national honors.

“One of the things that set him apart as a teacher,” said Coyne, “was he never stopped thinking about ways to do it better.”

Pandolfi’s brutal honesty could also be difficult for some parents to deal with, Coyne said. “If he gave you a compliment, you knew it was real.”

Susan Shippee, 55, lives in Foster and teaches physics and chemistry at Ponaganset High, where she and her sister and a bunch of friends all played French horn for Pandolfi in the early 1970s.

“He always demanded the best and he always had a way of getting the very best out of every one,” Shippee said. “We all played together because he made it so much fun. He would pull out a lot of music for us to play that would highlight that [French horn] section.”

He was always the disciplinarian, Shippee said, and students often recited “Nedo-isms” like: “If you’re early, you’re on time and [if] you’re on time, you’re late.” And, “We’re not stopping for [sour] notes, we’re stopping for [wrong] rhythm.”

Shippee still plays French horn. She was playing with one group until Pandolfi, several years back, helped launch the Rhode Island Wind Ensemble, largely made up of many of his former students. “He said ‘I want you to play for me’ and I did.”

Elizabeth Gates remembers the day she arrived at the high school. She had only been playing the French horn for a few months while many other students had started years earlier. “He said to me, ‘OK, I’m going to leave you alone for a year, but after that…’ So he knew enough not to totally intimidate you, but he knew how to challenge you.”

Pandolfi “made you care about everything. And he would just persist until he got the results he wanted. Even from kids who weren’t that into music. He made them realize they were apart of this group, and it was important for them and for the group and for the music.”

When Pandolfi retired, a reporter called him for comment: “What are you calling me for?” he asked. When it was suggested he was something of a celebrity within education circles, he insisted he was nothing more than “a teacher from a little rural town just doing my job.”

“Teachers,” he said, “should not be looking for notoriety. Our role is to teach, and that should be gratification enough.”

tmooney@projo.com