ACCELERANDO

The joint concert to be given tomorrow by the Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society, and members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra should mark what may be a new era in Harvard choral history. The successful performances of a few of the great choral works under Dr. Koussovitsky have finally encouraged the two Cambridge organizations to undertake a concert of their own which should not simply indicate the climax of the season's work, but for its own merit should be counted as one of the year's outstanding musical events in this part of the world.

To bestow such compliments before the performance is not mere idle chatter. The purpose is to indicate what inexhaustible possibilities there are for a large and skillfully trained mixed chorus. For the last fifteen years the Harvard Glee Club under Dr. Davison has made its reputation in this country and in Europe not only as a chorus of high calibre, but as a disseminator of good music. Through the combined efforts of Dr. Davison, Thomas Whitney Surette, and the Concord School of Music, the gospel has successfully been spread until it is now universally accepted. The work of the Glee Club in this line will naturally continue, but as an educator it will no longer constitute such an essential factor. The public, in fact, is looking for a little more from the Harvard Glee Club than its individual concert programs. This expectation the Glee Club may fulfill by familiarizing the musical world with the great choral works.

That this can only be accomplished with the cooperation of a woman's chorus and a full orchestra is fairly obvious. By bringing the Glee Club together again with the Radcliffe Choral Society and the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a special concert, Mr. Woodworth is at once broadening the scope of the Glee Club's repertoire and providing his audience with a program of classical and modern choral works seldom heard. It is an experiment which should serve as a precedent.