[Rarebooks] FS: 1930s Medieval Style Harvard Glee Club Membership Certificate

[Joslin Hall Rare Books, Ephemera & Photographs]

1930s Medieval Style Harvard Glee Club Membership Certificate.

A handsome printed and hand-colored membership certificate to the 
Harvard Glee Club, headlined “Cantorum Sodalitas Harvardiana”, and made 
out to Donald C. Thompson and signed by G. Wallace Woodworth, director 
of the Glee Club from 1933 to 1958.

According to its website, “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. In the early 
years of the 20th century, many HGC members were also singing in the 
Harvard University Choir. They appreciated the advantage of the vocal 
training and of learning sacred music, and they gradually convinced the 
Club to ask the University Organist and Choirmaster, Dr. Archibald T. 
Davison, to coach HGC. From 1912, “Doc” Davison expanded the Glee Club’s 
musical horizons and improved its vocal/choral abilities, as a larger 
HGC performed solo concerts as far afield as the Midwest. During this 
period, Doc began combining HGC with the women of the Radcliffe Choral 
Society for large choral-orchestral works; and in 1917, HGC and RCS 
began singing these works with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, an 
association that continued into the middle 1970s. The men of HGC liked 
these new experiences and in 1919 asked Doc Davison to become HGC’s 
first conductor. He agreed, with the proviso that the choice of 
repertoire would be his. By the 1920s, most of the basics of HGC had 
evolved: several dozen Harvard students, mostly from the College, 
singing serious choral music under the direction of a strong Conductor, 
traveling all over the United States and sometimes abroad to entertain 
and educate, encouraging and evoking the composition of new music, and 
performing choral-orchestral works with such as the Boston Symphony 
Orchestra, often combining with RCS.”

9.5”x14”. Slight stain in the lower right corner, minor scattered soil. 
[42754]  $75

A Picture =>
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