History of the Harvard Glee Club

America’s oldest college chorus, the Harvard Glee Club was founded in March 1858 by the president of Harvard’s Pierian Sodality and several of its College friends. Over the rest of the 19th century, HGC numbered about a dozen or two men and sang a repertoire ranging from old European and American college and folk songs to contemporary art songs to popular operetta/show tunes, often combining with banjo and mandolin ensembles and local bands. Its performances were not limited to metropolitan Boston but extended throughout the Northeast.

Today’s Harvard Glee Club consists of about 65 men, mostly undergraduates at Harvard College, plus a few students from Harvard’s graduate schools, from all over the USA and abroad, very few of them majoring in music or destined for a musical career. This HGC continues to flourish, singing good music well, demonstrating the persisting vitality of men’s choral music on campus and all over the world, in concert halls and schools and churches, live and on recordings, for novices and for the knowledgeable choral community. By itself and with the Radcliffe Choral Society and the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, HGC is a first-rate representative of Harvard to itself and to willing ears around the globe.

Director, Jameson Marvin

Jameson Marvin is Director of Choral Activities and Senior Lecturer on Music at Harvard University. He is responsible for the choral program at Harvard and conducts the Harvard Glee Club, the Radcliffe Choral Society, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, and teaches courses in Choral Conducting, Masterpieces of Choral Literature, and Renaissance Performance Practices.

Prior to his appointment to Harvard in 1978, Dr. Marvin was Director of Choral Music at Vassar College and Conductor of the Cappella Festival Chamber Choir and Orchestra. He has held conducting and teaching appointments at Bard College, Lehigh University and the University of Illinois. In 1984, he was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University and Cambridge University, England, and on his most recent sabbatical in 1998, he gave master classes to graduate choral programs on topics ranging from conducting and rehearsing to analysis and interpretation.

Over the past thirty-five years, Dr. Marvin has conducted some eighty symphonic-choral works while developing a national reputation as a conductor, teacher, author, and scholar. He served on the national committee for the selection of conducting candidates for Fulbright Fellowships and is General Editor of the Oxford University Press Renaissance Choral Series for Men’s and Women’s Voices. Dr. Marvin’s Harvard choral ensembles have appeared at six national conventions of the American Choral Directors Association.

Dr. Marvin received a Bachelor of Arts in Music Composition from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a Master of Arts in Choral Conducting from Stanford University, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Choral Music from the University of Illinois. The Boston Globe has called Dr. Marvin “a musician of consummate mastery.”