Messenger - Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 14 Spring 1994 Tales told out of school Mary Woodmansee Green, Delaware '68, is the director and conductor of the Kennett (Pa.) Symphony Orchestra, which frequently performs at Longwood Gardens, the world famous 1,050-acre horticultural exhibit in Longwood, Pa. She is the founder and former director of the Philadelphia Festival Chorus. Green was inducted into the Alumni Wall of Fame in 1985, and resides with her husband in Huntingdon Valley, Pa. Mary Woodmansee Green grew up in Newark, Del. She remembers playing in back of Newark Junior High School (now Pearson Hall on the campus) and sledding in the fields where Harrington Residence Hall Complex currently stands. At Newark High School, she sang and accompanied the school choirs, under the direction of Jane Cooper. After directing her own madrigal group in high school, Green decided she wanted to pursue orchestral directing as a career. Attending the University of Delaware was a natural step for Green, who entered the Department of Music in 1964. "I would walk around the campus and see professors I knew because my parents had invited them over for dinner." She chose Delaware for reasons other than its proximity to home. "I thought that going to a smaller university would give me the opportunity to explore beyond the piano," she says. Green describes the music department as intimate. "We were invited to professors' homes, and we regularly would have little recitals at the house of my music professor, Mildred Gaddis. "We had a music camp for a week before school started, and that's how all the musicians in the choir and band got to know one another. Most members were not music majors. Music majors had to be committed to the practice room. My senior recital, which was an hour and a half long, was terrifying and very memorable. I was not going to be a concert pianist, so I had to work especially hard before the recital," she says. Although Green was the accompanist for the college choir, under the direction of Ivan Tressler and Joseph Huszti, her interest still remained in conducting. Green began to study brass, winds and percussion, while taking an orchestral conducting class. The University itself, however, did not have an orchestra. "For an orchestra, you have to have strings, and to have strings, you really have to have a performance-oriented curriculum. For the most part, it was a tiny music department, and if someone wanted to go ahead and be a performer, they would go to a conservatory," Green says. She recalls one of the most exciting moments at the University was when she had an opportunity to conduct the concert band in two movements of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Green says she liked being in a liberal arts program; she calls herself a "cross-over" student. She became involved with the E-52 Theatre program, acting and helping with costuming. "I was able to be a part of the U.S.O. tour of Kiss Me Kate in 1965. It was co-sponsored by the University's theatre department and the U.S. State Department. I was the accompanist, and 17 of us traveled around Germany to Army bases. During one show, we were about halfway through the first act, when a quiet voice in back said, 'Alert!' All of a sudden, we saw tanks rolling in, and the hall quickly emptied. The troops dropped everything, got into battle gear and went out for about 50 hours of field exercises! We stopped performing when we realized that no one was coming back!" Experience with E-52 helped Green enhance her performances with the choirs and orchestras she now conducts, she says. "I can speak to the audience better, do short scenes from musicals and operettas, even help in choosing the costumes." The University helped Green, she says, to acquire knowledge about various instruments necessary to a conductor, allowing her to hone her conducting skills before she trained with Robert Page of Temple University. Since then, she has been involved in and conducted many different essembles. Of her instrumentalists in the Kennett Symphony Orchestra, she says: "It's a hard life, a very hard life. There's no security in it. We hire them to play six, seven, eight concerts, whatever we have a year, and we give no benefits. We pay them strictly for service, and a lot of them have to give it up and get a real job. But, these are people from all walks of life, and that is what makes my job so interesting." -Marceline A. Bunzey, Delaware '92M