Pomona College’s celebrated chamber choir—The Pomona College Glee Club, under the leadership of Donna M. Di Grazia— comes to Oak Park and Chicago (Illinois), Cambridge (Massachusetts) and New York (New York) from Claremont, CA for their 2025 concert tour. The Glee Club boasts a membership of 30 singers who passed a rigorous audition evaluating their individual strengths in singing and sight reading, their abilities to learn a great deal of music quickly, and their readiness to work within a small ensemble, where blend and musical sensitivity are essential. The ensemble will present a radiant offering of unaccompanied choral music, from charming 16th-century French chansons to the exquisite setting of Langston Hughes’ poem April Rain Song by Robert Harris. The program also includes works by Maurice Duruflé, Moses Hogan, Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel, Frank Ticheli, Ralph Vaughan Williams and others. All the concerts are free of charge. The public is welcome.
Choral Music at Pomona
Choral music has played an especially important role in the cultural life of Pomona College since its founding in 1887, beginning with the Choral Union and the Men’s Glee Club in the late 1800s, and the Women’s Glee Club in 1902. Today Pomona’s rich choral tradition continues, carried forward by two mixed-voice ensembles: the Pomona College Choir and the Pomona College Glee Club. Through the years, and under the spirited direction of its five principal conductors—Fred Bacon (1903–17), Ralph
Lyman (1917–48), William F. Russell (1951–82), Jon Bailey (1982–98) and Donna M. Di Grazia (since 1998)—hundreds of students from Pomona College and her sister Claremont Colleges have chosen the Choir and Glee Club as part of their curricular liberal arts experience, and as an avenue by which they can express themselves intellectually and artistically.
The Pomona College Glee Club, Pomona’s advanced chamber choir
The smaller of the two groups, 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 Handel’s Dixit Dominus, Bach’s Christ lag in 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 Elaine Hagenberg, Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen, Shawn Kirchner, Moses Hogan, Marques L. A. Garrett and many others. 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; recent 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.
Donna M. Di Grazia, the ensemble’s current conductor, holds the David J. Baldwin Professorship in Music and has been a member of the Pomona College faculty since 1998. She received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of California, Davis, where her principal conducting mentor was Albert McNeil; and her Ph.D. in musicology from Washington University in St. Louis. She is also an active musicologist and has been an active choral musician throughout her career. For more information, visit: pomona.edu/directory/people/donna-m-di-grazia.
SPRING 2025 TOUR PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
CONCERT I–Oak Park, IL • 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, May 21, 2025
Grace Episcopal Church, 924 Lake St, Oak Park, IL 60301
CONCERT II–Chicago, IL • 7:30 p.m., Thursday, May 22, 2025
Ganz Hall, Roosevelt University, 430 South Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605
CONCERT III–Cambridge, MA • 7:30 p.m., Saturday, May 24, 2025
First Church Cambridge UCC, 11 Garden St, Cambridge, MA 02138
CONCERT IV–New York, NY • 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, May 27, 2025
St. Joseph’s Church, 404 East 87th St, New York, NY 10128
FMI: Visit www.pomona.edu/glee-tour or call 909-621-8155. All concerts are free and open to the public. (No tickets required.)
Tour Program:
Duruflé – Tu es Petrus
Mäntyjärvi – Ave Maria d’Aosta
Raczyński – Gaudeamus omnes
Sermisy – Tant que vivray
Passereau – Il est bel et bon
Poulenc – La belle se sied au pied de la tour
Certon – La, la, la je ne l’ose dire
Vaughan Williams – Three Shakespeare Songs
Runestad – Let My Love Be Heard
Harris – April Rain Song
Ravel – Trois Chansons
Ticheli – Earth Song
Elder – The Heart’s Reflection
arr. Hogan – Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel