Harvard University Choir

The Harvard University Choir, more commonly referred to as the University Choir or simply UChoir, is Harvard University's oldest choir. It has provided choral music for the Harvard Memorial Church and its predecessor church for over 170 years, and is Harvard's only professional choir. Each year, a select group of choristers also make up the Harvard Choral Fellows, who sing at the church's daily Morning Prayers service in Appleton Chapel.

The University Choir is the only professional choir on campus. Singers are paid a significant stipend each year. The Choir is directed by Edward Elwyn Jones, the Gund University Organist and Choirmaster at Memorial Church. In fall 2009, UChoir performed in the 100th Carols Services, the oldest carols service in the country, and in that spring performed J.S. Bach's St. John's Passion.

While the first mention of choral performance at Harvard comes from the eighteenth century, a formal constitution of the University Choir was not seen until 1834; the constitution makes it clear, however, that the choir had existed before this date. One of the attractions of joining the choir at the time was the lack of supervision during compulsory Morning Prayers services.

The Choir sat in the Gallery and were left alone until it was time to sing; often they would sleep or read, paying little attention to the service. After the appointment of John Knowles Paine as the first University Organist and Choirmaster in 1862, the Choir attained the status of a professional performance choir.

The annual Christmas Carol services, the longest continually running services of their kind in the country, were founded in 1910 by Archibald T. Davison, who soon invited the women of Radcliffe College to participate, a tradition maintained by Davison's successor, Professor G. Wallace Woodworth.

John R. Ferris, who served as Choirmaster from 1958 to 1990, won high praise for performances of a wide variety of sacred choral literature by incorporating women into the previously all-male University Choir.

Under the directorship of Dr. Murray Forbes Somerville between 1990 and 2003, the choir began touring and recording CDs on the Koch International, Northeastern, Naxos, Centaur, Gothic, and ASV labels and, with the Boston Camerata under Joel Cohen, for Erato Records of France.

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