RCSF celebrated 125 years of friendship, joy, and choral excellence during Arts First weekend, May 2-3, 2025. The anniversary weekend began with a brief gathering before RCS’s standalone 125th Anniversary Concert on Friday, May 2 at 8:00 pm in Sanders Theater, and continued throughout the day Saturday (May 3, 2025), with singing, socializing, and food and drink, including participation by some of RCS’s past musical directors. For more details about the schedule for the weekend, see our schedule page.

Questions? E-mail us at rcsf125@gmail.com.

A Century and a Quarter of Music

In 1899, only five years after the former “Harvard Annex” was officially chartered as Radcliffe College, Radcliffe President Elizabeth Cary Agassiz founded the Radcliffe Choral Society. RCS was one of the very first women’s organizations at the university, and remains one of only a handful of student organizations to bear the Radcliffe name. In 2018, after more than a century of song, RCS, along with the other Harvard Choruses, amended its bylaws to welcome singers of all gender identities, while keeping its mission of furthering treble music and continuing RCS’s remarkable community of singers.

In the last 125 years, RCS has gone on tours across the country and around five continents, premiered works by a slew of talented composers (including RCS members and conductors), recorded albums, been jointly nominated for a Grammy award, and shared the stage with the Boston Symphony Orchestra many times. The student singers of RCS have had the chance to perform many of the most important works from nine centuries of choral literature, alone and in concert with the other Harvard Choruses, on stages across the country and all over the world.

Throughout, RCS has served as a home for students far from their own, giving them the chance to be part of an extraordinary body of choral work and providing the setting in which many RCSers have made some of their best lifelong friends. Thank you to everyone who joined us in our celebrations this year of another landmark in the long history of the organization that’s given joy to so many of us.

For more about RCS and its proud history, check out http://www.radcliffechoralsociety.com/history.html and https://radcliffechoralsociety.tumblr.com.