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Wearing a a purple dress and a mischievous expression, a diminutive woman scans the audience from backstage in in Bezanson Hall. A moment later the house lights go down, and Professor of Music Dorothy Ornest proceeds to her place at the piano to accompany her Opera Workshop students in a performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This witty production is not the sort of thing most people expect when they hear the word opera. An edgy, modernist rendition of the traditional folk tale, with a libretto by poet Anne Sexton and music by Conrad Susa, this Snow White has a distinctly irreverent feminist tilt.
Dorothy Ornest has her own irreverent feminist tilt, though she was not born to it and did not come by it easily. She joined the UMass music faculty in 1963 teaching voice and piano part-time, then became a full-time instructor when the degree-granting department was formed in 1964. A native of Utica, New York, and a graduate in voice and piano of the Eastman School of Music, Ornest -- "Miss Ornest," always, to her students--already had a strong career as a soprano soloist, singing leading roles in operas and oratorios in New England, as well as in New York City, Ann Arbor, Michigan and Rochester, New York.
"I was brought up to believe that if you did your job well, everybody would love you and you'd be rewarded. Can you believe it?" she says, raising her eyebrows in mock amazement. But as a single parent and the first woman in the UMass music department, she found herself relegated to second-class citizenship. There were no limits on the hours she was expected to work, she says, and few tangible rewards.
"I had to scramble my way up," she says. "Remember, this was before women's lib, before there was any kind of equity for women's salaries. There were five men ruling the roost, and I was told `Don't make waves.' And I thought about that and said, `No, I'm not going to wait to get my reward in heaven.'"
Ornest became a full professor in 1978. Department chair Ernest May, who came in 1976, calls her "the conscience of the department," the one who makes sure the the department does right by its students. In performance areas such as music, teachers must manage to sustain their own public, concert, and recording lives without neglecting their classroom obligations, which include giving lessons and coaching students. And, as is true for other coaches, they cannot take their "teams" -- student performing ensembles -- off-campus so often that it jeopardizes their other classes. Ornest, says May, has fought to see that students are taken care of. "Dorothy doesn't mince words," he says. "And sometimes that leads to sparks with her colleagues."
She doesn't mince words with her students either. For the most part, they appreciate that. One student staying behind after an Opera Workshop class asks about his major, wondering if he can finish by his fifth year. "How are you doing?" asks Ornest. He begins to list his problems: he's been sick, has had to miss classes. "I don't want your history," she says firmly. "Tell me how you're doing." A pause. "You're asking me to predict," she says. "You did a good job in this role, once you learned it, but you had me in pain till then - and everyone else too. Your original intention was to do composition. Do you have some experience there? A portfolio?" Another pause as the question hangs in the air. Then: "You have a lot of questions to ask yourself."
A voice teacher has a special responsibility: Because the instrument is the person, the teacher is simultaneously trainer, musical interpreter, critic, booster. The teacher walks a delicate line, making singers aware of what they are doing without inducing a paralyzing self-consciousness. And the teacher must demand a high level of accomplishment without straining the instrument.
"She strikes a real balance," says graduate student John Cavicchia, a member of Ornest's Opera Workshop and her studio class who also works as her teaching assistant. "She's extremely perceptive. If you have an inch of talent, she'll do what she can to bring it out. She puts you at your ease, works with your voice. She doesn't teach A Technique, but helps make your voice shine as best it can." What she asks in return is that you do the work. She is demanding, no-nonsense. Cavicchia uses the term "grande dame" about his teacher, but never suggests she is a prima donna. He is referring instead to an intensity of presence, a breadth of knowledge, a tradition of excellence.
Miss Ornest is warming Cavicchia up during a lesson. "You're just empty and filled with vibrating air," she says, pulling herself up to her full five feet and modeling an alert but relaxed, insouciant look. "Don't push it. Don't squeeze," she says, demonstrating an easy slide down from a high note on the syllable "feeeeeee."
All over the walls of Ornest's brightly lit studio in the Fine Arts Center are mementos, photos, cards, programs. A structural pillar is plastered, kiosk-like, with posters of student and faculty performances. On one wall is a student's framed, cross-stitched rendition of one of Miss Ornest's favorite vocal maxims: "Speak in a Space on the Breath." Another holds a section of the proscenium set for The Mother of Us All, the first staged performance she was involved with at UMass, a 1977 collaboration with Vincent Brann of the theater department.
The great thing about The Mother of Us All says Ornest, is that it has "umpteen characters, so we could use all the voice students. We were just getting started and it was obvious we all needed some learning." Then she adds, with her delighted whoop of a laugh, "A lot of people had to find out how to walk and sing at the same time." And so Opera Workshop was born.
Horace Clarence Boyer, her colleague who conducts the UMass Vocal Jazz Ensemble, affirms the need for staged singing. Singing in a choir is fine, he says, but solo and ensemble work in opera gives you the chance for a more complete experience, for "your body to endorse what the words are saying." He and Dorothy Ornest sang together in the oratorio Israel in Egypt back in 1974. "Though she's a little person," he says, "she had an amazing voice--big, warm, voluptuous."
In 1989, the Opera Workshop put on music professor Sal Macchia's chamber opera Liombruno, based on an Italian fairy tale. Macchia, who is a string bass player as well as a composer, wrote the opera with a narrator's role for Ornest. "We had a lot of fun with it," recalls Macchia, who was happy his composition had a chance to be performed and then taken on the road for eight performances in schools between Springfield and Somerville.
In 18 years as her colleague, Macchia has also come to know Dorothy Ornest well in her role as accompanist. "We've played everything from late Baroque music to contemporary," he says. "Dorothy has all the attributes you hope for in an accompanist: she plays well; she's a sensitive listener; and she's not afraid to tell you what's on her mind - more vibrato, louder, softer, it's not right yet." She is never overbearing, but always willing to speak up. That frankness holds true, he adds, in situations within the department that other people might want to avoid. "She and I have had occasion to disagree, and Dorothy has always been gracious about saying she was wrong - if she was. And when she was right, she's never rubbed it in."
The jewel in Dorothy Ornest's crown is surely her lifelong relationships with her students. Many of them returned in 1995 to celebrate her 75th birthday in a gala day of sing-ins, discussions, workshops, and of course a recital by two former students, with the birthday girl at the piano. Sal Macchia describes the occasion as "one of the most amazing events I've ever seen, an outpouring of love and support." It's very rare for people to have careers in singing, he says, but "what Dorothy has done is to make people aware of the beauties in music, and that carries them through life."
Music is not an ornament in Dorothy Ornest's life; it is her life. She does not ask anything of her students that she does not ask of herself. She holds herself to the highest standards of performance and responsibility, and expects those around her to do the same. In the past five years, she has undergone two hospitalizations for back surgery and has endured significant, even at times disabling, pain. Yet she has not missed class, nor has she lessened her rigorous schedule of accompanying students and colleagues. The only plans she has reluctantly relinquished have been her summer teaching trips to Japan. She is hoping that she will soon be able to resume them.
Dorothy Ornest will be officially retiring in December, but it will be hard to tell. Although she will not be offering Opera Workshop, she will keep her studio and continue teaching her voice students, and, as she puts it, "doing other things that interest me."
To mark this transition, Sal Macchia composed another musical piece based on an Italian fairy tale and narrated by Ornest, which was performed at Bezanson Hall February 25. "Divertimento: A Fairy Tale for Narrator and Double Bass" is, says Macchia, a "strength tale" about a woman who is not treated equally with men. "It's full of insider jokes," he explains, and its heroine "shows herself to be more virtuous, stronger than anyone, and her arch-enemy falls in love with her."
