A number of notable people were members of the Glee Club during their time at Harvard, and numerous major composers of the 20th and 21st centuries have dedicated works to the group.

The group remained small until the end of the nineteenth century, when growth in its size and on-campus profile made higher musical aspirations possible.

[4] This tour also resulted in a spate of new work written expressly for the Glee Club by such composers as Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Gustav Holst.

[5] Under "Doc" Davison, the Glee Club and the Radcliffe Choral Society became the choruses of choice for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and frequently recorded with them.

Since the retirement of Doc Davison, the Glee Club has had only five conductors: G. Wallace “Woody” Woodworth, who led the group from 1933 to 1958; noted Beethoven scholar Elliot Forbes, from 1958 to 1970, who led the group on an extensive tour around the world in 1961;[6] F. John Adams, 1970–1978; Jameson N. Marvin, 1978–2010; and Andrew G. Clark through the present.

[7] Many Glee Club members and assistant conductors have gone on to become leaders of American music, including composers, choral directors, and orchestra managers across the country.

As such, the students themselves are in charge of selecting concert venues, managing a six-figure yearly budget, and taking care of virtually every facet of the group.

Nearly four hundred alumni of the Glee Club attended the April festivities, which included the world premiere of Dominick Argento's "Apollo in Cambridge: A Harvard Triptych," a performance of Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms with the combined Holden Choruses and orchestra, seminars on a variety of musical, academic, and historical topics, and a well-attended Sesquicentennial Banquet.

In recent years, the Glee Club has performed numerous major works for male chorus, including Schubert's Gesang der Geister über den Wassern, Brahms's Alt-Rhapsodie, Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, and Argento's Revelation of St. John the Divine.

Another cornerstone of the Glee Club's repertoire is contemporary music; the group has a long history of commissioning or simply receiving work from prominent composers, some of whom are listed below, with the title of the work when available; each published work notes the dedication to the Glee Club on its title page: In addition, the Glee Club's conductors have a long tradition of dedicating folk song arrangements and editions of Renaissance vocal pieces to the group; Jameson Marvin's arrangements are published primarily by Oxford University Publishing and Earthsongs.