Pomona College’s celebrated Glee Club heads east for a May 21-27 concert tour. Led by Donna M. Di Grazia, the Glee Club will perform in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City. The ensemble will present unaccompanied choral music ranging from 16th-century French chansons to Langston Hughes’s poem April Rain Song put to music by Robert Harris.
In addition to their public concerts, the ensemble will engage in two choral exchanges with students at Oak Park River Forest High School near Chicago and at New York’s LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. Among the current members of the Glee Club are alumni of both high schools.
Choral music has played an important role in the cultural life of Pomona College since its 1887 founding. The Choral Union and the Men’s Glee Club were formed in the late 1800s and the Women’s Glee Club in 1902.
Today, the GleeClub includes 30 singers who passed a rigorous audition evaluating their individual strengths in singing and sight reading and their abilities as part of a small ensemble. Not limited to music majors, singers are drawn from fields of study across the natural and physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities and arts.
The Glee Club’s past tour destinations have included Italy, the United Kingdom, Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic, as well as a broad swath of the U.S.
To learn more about this year’s tour, visit www.pomona.edu/glee-tour or call (909) 621-8155.