Yale Glee Club to Participate in Joint Concert

The Yale Glee Club will sing its usual famous numbers folk and college songs at the annual Harvard-Yale concert in Sanders Theate. Harvard will sing choruses from Cimaress's opera, if Matrimonio Segreto, a portion of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, and college songs.

Yale's ability to sing college songs is well known; but while Harvard is not famous to its renditions of Segreto or Rex, the Harvard Glee Club is known for its ability to render these renditions in a manner becoming to the world's better choral groups.

Essentially, the difference between the two clubs is that the Harvard organization devotes itself to works of musical art and a limited concert tour; the Yales, Towever, avoid an overdose of the classical works, concentrate on the lighter numbers, and go on long concert tours that receive great applause both here and abroad. Also, Yale has a very expensive publicity program--contrary to the Crimson policy.

Harvard Experiments

In 1912 Dr. Archibald T. Davidson '06 of the Music Department became the Harvard Glee Club's first coach, and pioneered in developing the current renaissance in the American college trend to produce classical music.

At this time the Club threw aside the pleasant but essentially conventional and commonplace music which college glee clubs have always sung, divorced itself from the banjo and mandolin clubs of the College, and undertook the experiment of singing first-rate music, classical and modern. With Dr. Davison presentation of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, world premiere the Club suddenly came into prominence as one of America's outstanding men's choruses.

Yale and Fancy

Upon Dr. Davison's retirement, Professor G. Wallace Woodworth '24 continued to enlarge the Club's reportoire, vary its style, and to concentrate basically on further exploration of classical choral work. Simultaneously, and on the light side, the programs of the Club drew on the vast literature of folk songs, the glees and catches of the eighteenth century, and the gay operettas of Offenbach, Johann Strauss, and Gilbert and Sillivan.

Student singing at Yale has always had the characteristic of "hall hardy good fellow", and though there have been many singing groups on the campus since the first in 1813, the Yale Glee Club has been the largest and most indicative of the New Haven taste in music.

The Glee Club, founded in 1860 as the first established glee club of any size, has been considered through the years to be among the better but "typical" American college glee clubs. The New Haven idea of group music is light; is likely to catch one's fancy; and gives understandable reason why the Yale Glee Club should be in demand by the midwestern cities that appear on the Club's Ttours.