Princeton Glee Club’s Community of Singers Celebrates 150 Years

Members of the Princeton University Glee Club rehearse three times a week for a series of concerts throughout the year, including a performance at Reunions and the joint Yale-Princeton Glee Club concert. Every other year, the club also embarks on an international tour.

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Courtesy of Joshua Yang ’25

“I look back really fondly on our international tour [of the Balkans] from two years ago, which was my first time internationally touring with Glee,” said Jenia Marquez ’25, the Glee Club student president.

“While we were in Slovenia, we got to go to these caves, [and] we got to sing one of our pieces in a really big open space within the caves. That was perhaps one of my favorite choral experiences ever,” she said. “Where else am I going to be singing in a cave in Slovenia?”

This fall, the Glee Club’s marquee event will be in the more familiar cavern of Richardson Auditorium as the group celebrates its 150th anniversary. A Gala Weekend Nov. 15-17 will culminate in a concert expected to include the largest-ever gathering of alumni in the choir ensemble’s history. In addition to performances from current Glee Club members and British a cappella ensemble The King’s Singers, Glee Club director Gabriel Crouch plans to bring together alumni for a mass choir performance at 5 p.m. on Saturday evening.

Crouch will have just a single afternoon to rehearse hundreds of alumni. “It’s going to be pretty chaotic, but it’s going to be very, very gratifying,” he said.

The Glee Club, the largest and oldest choral group on campus, has long existed as a hub for student singers. Glee Club “is the place where student singing is nourished, where a sense of good practice is honed, [and] where the opportunity for personal growth as a singer through private voice study is created,” Crouch said, adding that over the years, many new singing groups have emerged from groups of Glee Club members.

Glee Club was founded by Andrew Fleming West 1874 in his senior year at Princeton. (West later served as the first dean of the Graduate School.) In its 150-year history, the group has seen myriad changes and traditions emerge: Princeton hosted its first joint concert with its Yale and Harvard counterparts in 1913; the group set off on its first overseas tours in the 1950s; and women joined the choir in 1969 as the University became coeducational for undergrads.

In the past decade, Glee Club membership has nearly doubled to boast around 90 students in any given year. Much of this expansion has been made possible due to Crouch’s push to accommodate a wide range of skill levels. “I want to make it possible for anybody to have that opportunity [to join Glee Club], whether they’ve had 10 years of high-level experience or whether they’ve had no experience whatsoever,” Crouch said.

Such a commitment to inclusivity and belonging also extends to the student experience and repertoire. “I think people stay in the choir because they’ve made a friend and because they feel like a part of the community, and I think it’s really important that that is maintained,” Marquez said. “Traditional choir music isn’t always necessarily the most diverse, and so [I wanted to make sure] that everyone can see themselves in Glee’s repertoire or has the opportunity to feel like they can contribute to that.”

Another recent Glee Club initiative seeks to further alumni outreach and engagement. The Glee Club Foundation, set up two years ago, connects current Glee Club members with approximately 2,000 Glee Club alumni around the world. As part of the preparations for the Gala Weekend, the foundation has coordinated a massive outreach effort to alumni. “Our major focus right now as a foundation is really making sure that everyone who would want to be involved [in the 150th anniversary celebrations] has an opportunity to and will get to celebrate this milestone together,” said Cat Sweeney ’20, president of the Glee Club Foundation.

Sweeney hopes that the anniversary will be merely the first in a series of opportunities for alumni to continue engaging with Glee Club after graduation. “I think it would be amazing to have alumni sings in cities across the country — perhaps [also] internationally, if we have alumni there — to give them a chance to get together and sing again,” she said.

For now, though, Glee Club members and alumni are focused on the weekend of festivities and singing ahead. “The thing that I’m looking forward to the most about this 150th [anniversary] is seeing so many old friends [and] familiar faces on Richardson stage and to sing with them again,” Crouch said.