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

[Joslin Hall Books & Ephemera]

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]  $45

A Picture =>
<https://www.joslinhall.com/images417/th-42754-cover.jpg>


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