Event details

As part of this year’s ‘Glee Club Presents’ series, The Christ Church Cathedral Choir celebrates its 500th anniversary and performs in collaboration with the students of the Glee Club.

This program showcases the rich musical legacy of a unique foundation — one that is both Oxford’s cathedral and a college of the University of Oxford. The program traces that history from John Taverner, appointed by Cardinal Wolsey in 1526 as the first Informator Choristarum, to more recently associated composers. A newly commissioned cantata by Composer in Residence Nico Muhly explores how poetry, art, and glass act as a membrane between the visible world and the divine.

Tickets

Free, Unticketed

About Christ Church Cathedral Choir

King Henry VIII established the Collegiate Foundation in 1546, including one Organist and eight Lay Clerks, plus provision for a schoolmaster to educate the choristers. In the last five hundred years, the choir has always been a central part of Christ Church; and many significant church musicians have been associated with it, from the first director of music John Taverner, to twentieth-century choristers and composers William Walton, Simon Preston and Howard Goodall.

Now the choral foundation consists of approximately sixteen Choristers (boys), educated at the Cathedral School; plus six Lay Clerks (professional adult singers) and six Academical Clerks (undergraduate choral scholars), in addition to the Director of Music (who bears the official historic title of ‘Organist’), the Sub-Organist, and one or two Organ Scholars.

The choir's primary role is to sing daily services in the Cathedral, but the choir also undertakes a busy annual schedule of concerts, broadcasts, tours, and recordings.

About Glee Club

The Glee Club is the oldest and largest choir at Princeton University, and has for generations served as the ‘hub’ for singers at Princeton – in which like-minded students come together to explore musical passions and make lifelong friendships. The choir has toured internationally, performing in Spain, Portugal, The Balkans, Mexico, and South Africa. There are six major performances this coming season, and numerous special appearances at functions and gatherings around campus. The choir embraces a vast array of repertoire, from Renaissance motets and madrigals, Romantic partsongs, large choral-orchestral masterworks, and 21st century choral commissions to the more traditional Glee Club fare of spirituals, folk music, and college songs. The spectrum of Glee Club members is perhaps even broader: undergraduates and graduate students, scientists and poets, philosophers and economists – all walks of academic life are represented, knit together by their belief in the nobility and joy of singing together.