Harvard Glee Club

The Harvard Glee Club is a 60-voice, all-male choral ensemble at Harvard University. Founded in 1858 in the tradition of English and American glee clubs, it is the oldest collegiate chorus in the US. 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 Harvard's current Director of Choral Activities Andrew Clark.

The Glee Club was long a fixture of the Boston music scene, performing frequently with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and other ensembles, but this local prominence has lessened in recent years. However, thanks to over 80 annual spring tours to different regions of the United States and appearances at the Kennedy Center Honors and in Leonard Bernstein's popular series The Unanswered Question, the Glee Club has garnered some national recognition; tours around the world have brought the group further attention. A number of notable people were members of the Glee Club during their time at Harvard, and numerous major composers of the 20th and 21st centuries have dedicated works to the group.

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. In 1921, the Glee Club embarked on its first European tour, which, though not the first such tour by a college group, was the most extensive to that point. The group was officially invited by the government of France, and the tour was covered by the press in the US and Europe. This tour also resulted in a spate of new work written expressly for the Glee Club by such composers as Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Gustav Holst. Under "Doc" Davison, the Glee Club and the Radcliffe Choral Society became the choruses 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.

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