By Bonnie Gelbwasser

The tuxedoed members of the WPI Glee Club may have to add "Happy Birthday" to their extensive repertoire this year. After all, it isn't every group that can boast 125 years of life.

The oldest student organization on campus has existed in some form since the spring of 1874, when nine members of the Class of 1876 came together as the Technical Glee Club to sing college songs. Disbanded and reorganized periodically during the next three decades, the organization was formally established as the Tech Glee Club in 1909. The group's 28 members practiced in Stratton Hall and charged 10 cents admission at their first concert.

The Glee Club helped WPI kick off its current capital campaign with a performance in Worcester's Mechanics Hall in April 1999.

In succeeding years, the Glee Club performed in various venues around Central Massachusetts, from Worcester's Horticultural Hall to local schools and churches. On these trips the members occasionally had to call upon their engineering skills as well as their vocal talents, once repairing their truck when it broke down and another time wrestling an errant trolley car back onto the tracks.

The club performed its first radio concerts in the 1920s, when it also inaugurated joint concerts with the women of Wheaton College. During those years the men performed often with some of the newer WPI musical organizations, including the Tech Jazz Orchestra and the Boyntonians.

In 1932, Clifford Green, organist and choirmaster at Worcester's Unitarian Universalist Church, began a 27-year career as Glee Club director. During his tenure, the club expanded to more than 40 members, enlarged its repertoire, and increased the number of yearly concerts from a dozen to 30. Another organist/choirmaster, Henry Hokans of All Saints Church, succeeded Green in 1959.

Louis Curran assumed the Glee Club baton when he joined the faculty as WPI's first professor of music in 1966. Since then, he has led the group in local and collegiate exchange concerts and liturgical celebrations and directed performances on radio and TV. The choir still performs as many as 30 times a year, singing selections from a diverse repertoire that ranges from Mozart, Stravinsky and Schubert to more modern music. Its singing partners include choristers from Radcliffe, Regis, Smith, Wellesley, Wells, Wheaton and Wheelock.

Curran prepared the group for its first concert at Worcester Memorial Auditorium, where it performed with the Detroit Symphony, and shepherded the singers on their first tour to a distant venue, Washington, D.C., where they arrived during the fiery April 1968 weekend of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. In 1977 Curran was on the podium when the singers performed J.S. Bach's Magnificat as the first choral group to open the newly restored Mechanics Hall. Since that time, the musicians have toured Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, England, Germany and Spain. They have released five recordings, including music commissioned specifically for the group.

Curran has an abundance of memories from his nearly 33 years as director. "On a tour to Rome," he says, "the Pope called us forward after the general audience. In Los Angeles, the women of Wheelock and the members of our club burst into Saints Bound for Heaven in the airport's rotunda, causing all movement to stop. And in Paris, the applause of some 2,000 people almost drowned out the great organ in Notre Dame Cathedral after we performed the music for High Mass and ended with Fenno's eight-part song In That Great Gittin' Up Mornin'."

Esteemed for its musicianship and professionalism during nearly all of its 125-year history, the Glee Club continues to accumulate accolades. After a recent performance with the Concord (Mass.) Orchestra of the 5th movement of the Busoni Concerto for Piano, Orchestra and Men's Chorus, Boston Globe reviewer Richard Dyer noted that the WPI men "pumped out sound of ringing quality in comprehensible German."

In 1999, the organization established the Clifford Green Award to be given for longstanding support of the Glee Club and created an endowment to support operational expenses, such as music, travel and guest soloists. "With the continuing support of Glee Club alumni, I think the endowment will be successful," says club president and baritone Tim Thies '00. "Response from alumni and friends has been enthusiastic," adds Theodore L. "Ted" Dysart '94, who is spearheading the initiative. "To date, we are near the halfway point of our $50,000 goal. I am confident that we will reach this goal with the support of alumni who want to help give future students the same opportunities that we all enjoyed during our college years."

Editor's Note: Information about the early years of the Glee Club was taken from a Humanities Sufficiency completed by Paul Torcellini '86. For more information about the Glee Club, visit the club's Web site, www.wpi.edu/~gleeclub.