‘Stop talking and sing!’ UK Opera, Lexington Singers founder dies at 97

Phyllis Jenness, a respected voice teacher of exacting standards who founded both the University of Kentucky opera program and the Lexington Singers while training several generations of operatic singers over 66 years, died Saturday. She was 97.

Her wife, Lori White, said Ms. Jenness died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia. Ms. Jenness had been teaching group voice and sight-reading classes as recently as a week and a half ago, White said, before having trouble breathing and receiving treatment at Baptist Hospital. She returned to her home in Lexington on Thursday, dying there two days later. Ms. Jenness was not tested for the coronavirus, White said, and it’s unclear whether it was a factor in her death.

“I had the honor of being with her when she passed,” said White, Ms. Jenness’s partner for 34 years; they married four years ago. “She was a great teacher and a true leader.”

A native of Northboro, Mass., Ms. Jenness studied math and science at what is now Bridgewater State University. Her passion was for singing and opera, however, and she soon began private training and performing, as a contralto, in New York City.

In 1954, she answered an ad for a teaching position in the music department at the University of Kentucky and was hired almost immediately, despite her lack of a degree in music. (She later earned a master’s degree in music history at UK while leading the opera program.) She had high artistic standards and an unrelenting work ethic, often admonishing her students: “Stop talking and sing!”

“A great many of her students remember her trying to help them find their true voice,” recalls Andy Moore, one of Ms. Jenness’s long-time students. “She’d say, You’ll never sing like (the great Swedish tenor) Jussi Björling — just give that up. Don’t try to be someone you aren’t.”

Ms. Jenness also made her mark off campus, founding the Lexington Singers in 1959.

“From the beginning, Phyllis set the bar really high and treated them like a professional choir,” says Jefferson Johnson, the Singers’ current conductor as well as director of choral activities at UK. “Early on, she was programming things like the Brahms Requiem, which was highbrow repertoire for a community chorus. And had she not been as great a musician and teacher as she was, the Lexington Singers probably would have gone the way of most community choruses, which is a short life.”

Instead, the 150-member ensemble has grown into one of the largest and oldest groups of its kind in the country. The choir is in the early stages of planning a memorial concert honoring Ms. Jenness’s life and legacy, Johnson said. But its timing is contingent on developments in the current public health crisis.

After leaving UK at the then-mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1993, Ms. Jenness began another chapter in her life as a philanthropist, raising about $150,000 from her ongoing voice teaching to support her favorite charities, including an orphanage in Guatemala.

Ms. Jenness is survived by White as well as her nephew, Robert Jenness, his wife, Carol, and their children. Contributions in Ms. Jenness’s honor can be made to the Singers at lexsing.org/support-us.html.

This story was originally published March 24, 2020 at 4:12 PM.