Harvard Glee Club

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Harvard Glee Club is a 60-voice, all-male choral ensemble at Harvard University. Founded in 1858, it is the oldest college choir in the United States and has operated continuously since its founding.^{[citation needed]} The Glee Club is part of the Holden Choruses of Harvard University, which also include the all-female Radcliffe Choral Society and the mixed-voice Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum. All three groups are led by Conductor Dr. Jameson Marvin and Associate Conductor Kevin C. Leong.

1 About the Current Group
2 History
3 Musical tradition
4 See also
5 Footnotes
6 References
7 External links

[edit] About the Current Group

The Harvard Glee Club is faculty-directed but entirely student-managed. Students hold the elected positions of President, Vice President, and Secretary; they also hold appointed positions such as Manager, Financial Manager, Sales Manager, and so on. Each tour and major project, such as a large concert or recording project, has its own manager. As such, the students themselves are in charge of selecting concert venues, managing a six-figure yearly budget, and taking care of virtually every facet of the group other than rehearsing and selecting repertoire.

The Glee Club rehearses in Holden Chapel in Harvard Yard, one of the oldest college buildings in America (built in 1744).^[1] Each year, major concerts include the Harvard-Princeton and Harvard-Yale Football Concerts, joint concerts that have taken place the night before these football games for more than a century; annual concerts also take place at Christmas and during Harvard's Arts First celebration in May. The Glee Club tours a different part of the United States every spring break; recent spring tours have taken the group to northern California, the Upper Midwest, and the Deep South; the 2006-07 Spring Tour will be to Texas. The Glee Club also takes month-long summer tours roughly every 4 years. Recent summer tours have included trips to East Asia (1993), Australia (1998), Scandinavia (2002), and Central Europe (2005). During the most recent Central Europe tour, the group performed at such venues as the Berlin Philharmonie, the Mariacki Church in Kraków, the Matthias Church in Budapest, and as guests of the Kodály Festival in Hungary and the Dvorák Festival near Prague.

The group performs most of its concerts in Harvard's Sanders Theatre, which is renowned for its excellent acoustics [1].

[edit] History

Historical image of the Glee Club around 1900

The Glee Club was founded in 1858 by a group of students to sing glees and part-songs. The group remained small until the end of the nineteenth century, when growth in its size and on-campus profile made higher musical aspirations possible. In 1919, it invited Dr. Archibald T. "Doc" Davison, the choirmaster of Harvard's Memorial Church, to become Glee Club conductor as well. 1921 saw the Glee Club's first European tour, which, though not the first such tour by a college group, was the most extensive to that point; the tour was covered by the press in the US and France (the Glee Club's archives hold a number of long feature articles about the tour in a variety of newspapers) and expanded the Club's reputation worldwide. Under "Doc" Davison, the Glee Club (and the Radcliffe Choral Society) became the choirs of choice for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and frequently recorded with them; their recording of La Damnation de Faust won a Grand Prix du Disc, and a recording of the Mozart Requiem in memory of former U.S. President and Harvard graduate John F. Kennedy received a nomination for a Grammy. The relationship with the BSO continued until the creation of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus; both Club and Society continue to sing with the BSO on occasion.

Since the retirement of Doc Davison, the Glee Club has had only four conductors: G. Wallace “Woody” Woodworth 1933-1958; Elliot Forbes, 1958-1970; F. John Adams, 1970-1978; and Jameson N. Marvin since 1978. Many Club members and assistant conductors have gone on to become leaders of American music, including composers, choral directors, and orchestra managers across the country. Some notable alums of the Glee Club include Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter, Leonard Bernstein, Irving Fine, John Harbison, William Christie, Hugh Wolff, Justice Harry Blackmun, and writer John Silas Reed.

In recent years, the Glee Club has continued to tour extensively, and has further burnished its reputation by being invited to a number of conventions of the American Choral Directors Association, invitations that are only extended through a blind audition process. In the past few years alone, the Glee Club appeared at regional conventions in Pittsburgh in 2002 and Boston in 2004 and at a national convention in Los Angeles in 2005.

The Glee Club is currently in the midst of planning its 150th anniversary celebration, which is to include a large-scale cross country tour and an appearance at the Ravinia Festival in 2008.

[edit] Musical tradition

Glee Club promotional material

The Glee Club performs a wide range of repertoire. Music of the Renaissance, the area of expertise of F. John Adams and Jim Marvin, has been an integral part of that repertoire, as has world folk music, especially of America and Eastern Europe. Another cornerstone of the repertoire is contemporary music, and the group has a long history of commissioning work from prominent composers. The Glee Club has premiered works by Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Gustav Holst, Irving Fine, Elliot Carter, John Harbison, Virgil Thomson, Randall Thompson, Morten Lauridsen, Stephen Paulus, and many others; most recently, the group received new pieces by Paul Moravec and Dominick Argento.

In recent years, the Glee Club has performed numerous major works for male choir, including Schubert's Gesang der Geister über den Wassern, Brahms's Alt-Rhapsodie, Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, and Argento's Revelation of St. John the Divine.

Symphony collaborations over the years have included multiple performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) under all of its conductors since 1917, as well as with the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, and the Italian Radio Orchestra. Some BSO highlights include the American premiere of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, later recorded with the BSO under Bernstein, two Berlioz recordings - Romeo et Juliet and La Damnation de Faust, and Mozart’s Requiem. In 1973, the Glee Club performed Bernstein's Chichester Psalms with the composer conducting at the Vatican. The Glee Club now frequently performs with Boston's Orchestra of Emmanuel Music.

The Glee Club frequently performs traditional Harvard football songs, such as "Yo-Ho," "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard," "Harvardiana," "The Gridiron King," "Soldiers' Field," and "Up the Street."

The Glee Club also has a subset called "Harvard Glee Club Lite," or simply, "Lite." This group, which features 12-16 singers and performs pop and jazz a cappella arrangements, was formed in the 1990s to give Glee Club members a chance to sing a wider range of music; Harvard has over a dozen a cappella groups on campus, and Lite allows students to experience both types of ensemble - a small, student-directed pop-driven group and a larger, faculty-led choral ensemble.