The Pomona College Glee Club

The Pomona College Glee Club, is an elite chamber choir that attracts members from the Claremont Colleges and Claremont Graduate University, California. Among its most distinguished alumni are 14-time Grammy® winner Robert Shaw ’38, the most influential choral conductor in the twentieth century, and Howard Swan ’28, 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 sixteenth 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, Handel’s Dixit Dominus, and Brahms’s Liebeslieder Walzer, as well as shorter works by many other composers from across the centuries and today.

International touring destinations have included Florence, Venice, Rome, London, 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), Grace Cathedral (San Francisco), the Thomaskirche (Leipzig), the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis (St. Louis), and the National Cathedral (Washington, D.C.).