Harvard Glee Club - The Glee Club Today

The Glee Club Today

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, and Sales Manager, currently held by Christopher Husch, Emmet Jao, and Ben Lopez respectively. Each tour and major project, such as a large concert or production and release of a recording, has its own student 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. Built in 1744, Holden is one of the oldest college buildings in America. The group performs most of its "home" concerts in Harvard's Sanders Theatre, which is renowned for its excellent acoustics. 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 with the Radcliffe Choral Society at Christmas and with all of the Holden Choruses 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, the Deep South, and 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 tour to Central Europe, 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 2007-2008 season marked the 150th anniversary of the Glee Club's founding. Highlights included a week-long tour of the Eastern Seaboard and a three-day festival in Cambridge from April 11–13, 2008. Nearly four hundred alumni of the Glee Club attended the April festivities, which included the world premiere of Dominick Argento's "Apollo in Cambridge: A Harvard Triptych," a performance of Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms with the combined Holden Choruses and orchestra, seminars on a variety of musical, academic, and historical topics, and a well-attended Sesquicentennial Banquet. The anniversary celebration continued into the summer of 2008 with a cross-country concert tour culminating in appearances at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Ravinia Festival.