Rose Pettinelli - Interview
In front of the red light … with Rose Pettinelli! Watch the Full Interview here.
When you talk to Rose Pettinelli, the first thing you notice is how her creativity and energy shines through in ever sentence.
“I just do what I want to do,” she says, with the kind of grounded clarity that only comes from deeply knowing who you are—even if you’re still figuring out what to call it.
Rose is a woodwind doubler—meaning she plays not just one or two instruments, but an entire family: oboe, saxophone, clarinet, and flute. She studied jazz baritone sax and classical oboe at William Paterson during the height of COVID, and is now pursuing a master’s in woodwind doubling at Montclair State. That’s four separate lessons and four juries every semester. “It’s insane,” she laughs, “I know, it’s crazy.”
Raised in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, in a tightly woven Italian American musical family, Rose didn’t just grow up around music—she was literally surrounded by it. Her grandparents owned a music store, her grandfather ran a big band, and her uncles, aunts, and cousins all played and sang. Her dad plays accordion and the full woodwind lineup. Her Uncle Peter is a bassoonist and an opera singer. “He's like a built-in teacher,” she says. “It’s amazing to just walk 50 feet and get a voice lesson from someone who studied opera.”
Rose’s music practice is deeply personal and relentlessly multifaceted. She doesn’t just move between genres—she lives in multiple musical languages. “The academic world of jazz and classical are so separate, you wouldn't even think they're both music,” she reflects. “They’re almost never talked about in the same sentence.”
That refusal to conform has always been her superpower—and her challenge. In a world that wants you to pick a lane, Rose exists between them, unapologetically.
But that resistance can also come at a cost. Especially for women.
“Being a woman in jazz can be really isolating,” she says. “I’ve dealt with a lot of sexism. There’s this unspoken thing—it’s like there can only be one woman in jazz. That’s it.” She’s seen other women pushed out of school programs, sidelined in ensembles, dismissed by peers. “It’s not just about talent. It’s about power.”
Despite that, or maybe because of it, Rose is still here—still creating, still doubling (tripling? quadrupling?) down on her artistry. She doesn’t always know what to call herself, but she knows how she wants to feel: expansive, authentic, free.
“I think I’m still figuring it out,” she says. “But I know I’m someone who loves creating. And I love having different mediums to do that. It’s like a toolkit.”
And if her toolkit includes saxophones, flutes, family legends, dueling bands…then all the better.
