'Bye, Champagne Charlie

The 16 men of the Harvard Glee Club ranged themselves in a semicircle on Boston's Jamaica Plain and began to serenade the ladies in the lighted window above. They warbled songs like Mother, I'm Slowly Dying and The Man in the Moon's Ball. Midway through, they were interrupted by a band of town boys who made rude noises on wind instruments, unhitched the Harvards' horses and sent them trudging on foot back to Cambridge. That was in Harvard's musical infancy. Last week the glee club assembled again (present membership: 135) to celebrate its centennial with the help of the Radcliffe Choral Society and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The program: Bach's B Minor Mass.

The Harvard Glee Club long ago abandoned the Cambridge equivalent of Whiffenpoofing to campus groups like the

Dunster Dunces and the Krokodiloes, and has become one of the finest choral groups in the U.S. The man who started to lead the Harvards to serious music in 1912 (despite the anguished protests of many an old alumnus) was Conductor Archibald Thompson Davison. The man who has kept them up to the mark is G. Wallace ("Woody") Woodworth, and last week he too celebrated an anniversary: his 25th year as glee club conductor. Woody himself went out for the club as a Harvard freshman, was firmly turned down by Conductor Davison, who told him: "With your ear, you ought to be playing drums in the band." He nevertheless wangled a job as assistant accompanist, earned an M. A. in music and a job in the music department before succeeding Davison.

Harvard's glee club today has the largest repertory of any college glee club in the land: 169 works in English, Latin, French, Italian, Tagalog and German. It has recorded Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, and works by such varied composers as Gabrieli, Piston. Byrd, Randall Thompson, Hindemith, Palestrina, Berlioz. Its concerts with the Boston Symphony have become city fixtures. This year, as every year, the club will perform in clubs, museums and theaters from Cambridge to Texas (48 concerts), will leave after final exams for a European tour. It performs for pay ($200 to $1,400 a concert), this year is operating on a budget of more than $20,000.

Much of the glee club's effectiveness derives from Woody Woodworth's genius for making the choral literature exciting. A sharp-featured, intense man, he throws himself into his work with such flamboyant enthusiasm that one Boston Symphony musician watching him conduct last week said wonderingly: "Who does he think he is--Koussevitzky?" Conductor

Charles Munch once commented: "It is a joy to make music with them." To Woody, a greater joy is the knowledge that, partly thanks to his group, no college glee club worthy of the name can any longer get by with Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral and Champagne Charlie.

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