Pomona College Glee Club – Past Concerts

The Glee Club is Pomona’s advanced choral ensemble; among its most distinguished alumni are 14-time Grammy® winner Robert Shaw (class of 1938), the most influential choral conductor in the twentieth century, and Howard Swan (class of 1928), revered in the field as the dean of choral music education in the United States. Each spring semester, up to 32 of the Claremont Colleges’ most gifted singers, with majors drawn from across the natural and physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities and arts, come together to explore a challenging classical repertoire from the 16th century to the present, focusing especially on works for unaccompanied voices.

Selected as a finalist for the 2017–18 American Prize in choral performance (university/college division) based on performances from the 2013–17 ensembles, the Glee Club has performed a wide variety of extended works, including Bach’s Christ lag ist Todesbanden, Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli and Brahms’s Liebeslieder Walzer, as well as many shorter works by composers from across the centuries and today, including Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen, Shawn Kirchner, Moses Hogan and Marques L. A. Garrett. It was also honored to offer the premieres of Tom Flaherty’s A Timbered Choir (2001) and Shakespeare Sonnets (2004), and to be included in the exhibition “Noyses, sounds, and sweet aires”: Music in Early Modern England at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. (2006).

The Glee Club rehearses from January through April in preparation for a series of on- and off-campus concerts, and for its annual tour immediately following Commencement. International destinations have included Florence, Venice, Rome, London, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Kraków, Wrocław, Leipzig, Dresden, and Prague; frequent domestic travel has included New York, Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington, D.C. The group has sung by invitation at St. Peter’s Basilica (Rome), St. Mark’s Basilica (Venice), Trinity College Chapel (Cambridge), St. Giles Cathedral (Edinburgh), Grace Cathedral (San Francisco), the Thomaskirche (Leipzig), the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis (St. Louis), and the National Cathedral (Washington, D.C.).

To hear a sample of past ensembles, please visit pomona.edu/choral/glee-club.