College Cancels Spring Concert

The Wyclef Jean and Jurassic 5 concert planned for May 6 will not take place Harvard Concert Commission (HCC) head and Undergraduate Council President Sujean S. Lee ’03 said yesterday.

College administrators decided to cancel the concert out of concern that the HCC would not be able to sell the more than 3,000 tickets necessary to fill the Bright Hockey Center, the planned venue for the concert, by Monday. Ticket sales had yet to begin because of a delay in signing the contract.

“It’s a crushing disappointment,” Lee said. “For some reason the administration had a change of heart and decided that it would be the safest thing to just not have the concert.”

Lee said that the commission had already finalized preparations for the concert and expressed frustration with the administration’s decision to cancel the concert.

“Our production was secured, a budget was written up, hospitality for the artists was taken care of, we were just waiting to get a contact so that tickets could go on sale,” Lee said. “Despite the concert commission’s efforts, they are forbidding us to sign off on the contract, which essentially means that the concert is being blocked.”

Lee told the council at their weekly meeting last Sunday that there was a verbal agreement with the artists and that Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel was just “finalizing the contract.”

But the signing of the contract negotiations were not proceeding quickly enough, said Associate Dean of the College David P. Illingworth ’71 who cancelled the negotiations.

“The details are very complicated,” Illingworth said. “We just didn’t have enough time to get all of this together.”

Illingworth said that he was impressed by the amount of effort put in by members of the HCC and was disappointed that there would be no concert.

“The students were working on it to the best of their ability, but unfortunately they didn’t get everything done to my satisfaction,” he said.

The Wyclef concert would have been the culmination of months of work by the HCC to bring a concert to Bright.

In September Lee said she expected the HCC to get at least two and hopefully three or four concerts by the end of the school year. Last October’s Dispatch concert will be the only show solely planned by the HCC this year, though they did play a role in bringing The Verve Pipe to Springfest.

Lee said that while she is frustrated at not being able to have a show next week, she understands Illingworth’s concern.

“The administration has to act to protest the University, and given the time constraints they think it’s the wisest move to avoid the financial risk of not selling out in the next four days by just cancelling.”

Both Lee and Illingworth said that despite the setbacks the HCC has seen this year, they expect to use what they have learned to bring concerts to campus next year.

“I certainly admire the students on the concert commission,” Illingworth said. “If they start working now on something for September or October, I think they can pull it off.”

—Staff writer Joseph P. Flood can be reached at flood@fas.harvard.edu.