Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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Continuing its reduced but ambitious wartime pro- gram, the Glee Club in 1943-1944 sang in 20 concerts, including first performances in Boston and in Carnegie Hall, New York, of the difficult Free Song, 1943 Pulitzer prize-winning composi- tion by William Schuman around words by Walt Whitman. A combined Harvard-Radcliffe chorus also sang the powerful Bach Il4cl.f.f1:l2 B Minor with the Boston Symphony. Woody's Missionaries Membership hit an all-time low in 1944-1945, but the season was memorable nonetheless for Randall Thompson's Termment of Freedom, which the Club sang with the Boston Symphony and recorded for RCA Victor. Another musical achievement was the Gabriel Faure music festival in 1945, under the direction of Mme. Nadia Boulangerg and a new recording was made, Bach's Cantata No. 106, Goefx Time ix Bert, with Rad- cliffe and members of the Boston Symphony. In 1947-1948 Sever 11 began to be crowded at rehearsals again, and returning '46 veterans sang in parts of Handel's zlfletriab with Wellesley, Stravinsky's Symjzbony ofP.rezlm.s' with Radcliffe and the Boston Symphony, and the now familiar Brahms Requiem. A projected summer tour to Holland, Belgium, and Denmark had to be abandoned for lack of funds, but it occupies high priority in the Club's ambitions for the future. As graduation severs them from these ambitions and there remain only memories of stiff collars, Symphony Hall, spring trips, and the tempests of sound as Bach's Matt and Woody's anecdotes alternately rocked the walls of Sever Koussevitzky reaches for second bass as Harvard and Radcliffe jointly rehearse Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for the Boston Symphony Pension Fund Concert. Hall, '46 Glee Club members scatter on their several ways with a new artistic appreciation, missionaries of Harvard's faith in good choral music wherever they go. Long hours of rehearsal culminate in the annual Sanders Theatre spring concert. 12771-

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Standing for better tone and volume, Woody and the Glee Club punch home a crescendo in the Sever 11 practice room. The Glee Club is one of the Nation's Foremost Clioruses One of the series of spring Yard Concerts on the steps of Widener. At the end of each program students join the Glee Club to sing College songs. The present Harvard Glee Club is a far cry from the days when no College man dared to sing anything more classi- cal than Swmzee River even in the shower, and it was thought improper for Harvard and Radcliffe students to sing together in a mixed choir. Since then, through the inspiration and perspiration of its two great conductors, Professors A. T. Davison and G. Wallace Woodworth, the Glee Club has grown into one of the nation's foremost choruses, possessing its own large and varied library of choral music, and regularly present- ing the masses and requiems of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The Club's self-effacing but astute business management has made it finance itself from numerous concerts and recordings, so that it need follow the dictates only of its own high stand- ards of musical achievement. ' During the war, Woody and the Club officers de- liberately lowered voice requirements and shortened rehearsals, in order to give as many as possible the opportunity to par- ticipateiin great music. Some 55 members of '46 warbled their way successfully through quartet trials and were later elected to membership and entitled to the Club shingle Their first season, 1942-1943, was marked by creditable per- formances of Brahms' Requiem and Beethoven's Ninth Symplaony. 12761-

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On to Soldiers Field. The best in the business, acclaimed the New Yorker in 1946, as the Harvard Band enjoyed its first post-war season after a few lean and naval years. '46 men had seen the Band through its entire wartime history-thirty of them had marched with the 1942-1943 Band, many remained in the ranks of the smaller Navy V-12 Band, and eleven returned to help Musical Director Malcolm H. Holmes '28 and Drillmaster Guy V. Slade '31 organize the 1946-1947 Band. Only a few rehearsal hours under this leadership sufficed to put a hundred-man band on the field at the Connecticut game, with such success that funds materialized for several football trips away from Cambridge. The Band Never Loses a Game Perhaps typical of the Band's energy was the Princeton game, where it earned the New Yarkerlr accolade. Guy Slade and his men marched through the special train to Old Nassau bolstering fighting spirit with Harmrdirzmz and Ten Tlaomwm! Men of Harvard, and at seven o'clock the next morning the Princeton campus was awakened by a tuneful reveille and more Cantabrigian echoes, but the Band still had enough wind left that afternoon to give the cheering thousands in the stands one of its best performances. An Unbeaten Season Football season over, the Band plunged into its even more exacting concert work, including recording. Before the war '46 Bandsmen had made recordings, whose musical merit was unimpaired by the odd fact that they played from the center outwards, but whose circulation had been small. The 1946 Ivy League Album of popular college medleys, however, won immediate praise and popularity and sold several thousand sets privately, defying a union ban on public sale. Other Band performances included veterans' hospitals, the Harvard Club of Boston, and the spring Sanders Theater concert. The Band also played for the major basketball and hockey games, marched in Patriots' Day parades in Boston and Lexington, and supplied the music for Class Day and Commencement. Members of '46 were back again for the 1947-1948 season, and less than three weeks after registration they en- trained with the Band and presented a concert in Richmond, Virginia, before appearing at the football game with Virginia in Charlottesville. A memorable event of this southern trip was a brief concert on the Capitol steps in Washington. The The 1942 Band was the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal football season. 12781-