The Occidental College Glee Clubs had their beginning in 1906 with the founding of a men's choral group, followed in 1912 by a women's club. Except for a period in the latter part of the twentieth century there has been both a Men's Glee Club and a Women's Glee Club. Each had a succession of directors in the formative years, local men and women of distinguished musical talent. One of the first was O. F. Tallman who conducted the Men's Glee Club from 1911 to 1918 and gave the Women's Glee Club its start.
In 1926, Walter E. Hartley, an experienced music scholar, became a full-time appointment in Occidental's Department of Music and directed the Glee Clubs. Howard Swan followed as director from 1934 until retirement in 1971, a period when the Glee Clubs earned a national and international reputation for superb choral music. He was succeeded for a brief time by Henry Gibbons, who was followed by Thomas Somerville, a Bach scholar, under whose specialty and expertise performances of classical masterworks, especially from the Baroque, received wide acclaim. Since 1997, Jeffrey Bernstein as Glee Clubs director has through his energy and talents brought renewed strength and enthusiasm to the choral program.
From the beginning the Glee Clubs have played a central role in the life of the College giving voice to college spirit and drawing musicians of the highest caliber to Occidental. Their reputation for excellence has carried the banners of Occidental far into the musical world through national and international tours and recordings and through the generations of choral conductors who were affiliated with Occidental.
An example of national recognition came in 1961 when by invitation the Glee Clubs sang under famed conductor Bruno Walter in an all-Brahms recording for Columbia Records. In 1969, the Glee Clubs were selected to represent the United States in the second International College and University Choral Festival sponsored by Lincoln Center in New York City. Another memorable event was their participation in Elinor Remick Warren's Good Morning, America! a work for chorus and orchestra commissioned by Occidental for the 1976 Bicentennial. In 2000, as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the death of J. S. Bach, the Glee Clubs collaborated with the nationally acclaimed Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra and soloists in a performance of Bach's St. John Passion. Since then the Glee Clubs have performed numerous choral-orchestral works including Faure's Requiem, Handel's Messiah, and Pergolesi's Stabat Mater and have sung in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the Pasadena and Santa Monica Symphony Orchestras.
Jeffrey Bernstein is Director of Choral Music at Occidental College and Assistant Conductor of the
Pasadena 
Symphony. Prior to beginning his post at Occidental in 1997 he served as Acting Associate Director of Choral Activities at Harvard University where he was apprenticed to Jameson Marvin and conducted the 200-voice Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus and the world-famous Harvard Glee Club. Bernstein holds a Ph.D. in Composition from UCLA, an M.M. in Choral Conducting from the Yale School of Music, and an A.B. magna cum laude in Music from Harvard College. He has led a dozen concert tours in this country and abroad and has appeared as a frequent guest conductor with the Transylvanian State Philharmonic Chorus in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. His vocal arrangements were featured in the 2002 film 'Slackers' and his concert compositions have been premiered in Italy, Romania, and throughout the United States. In February 2006 he was honored to appear in concert conducting the Occidental Glee Clubs before nearly 1,000 choral conductors at the American Choral Directors Association convention in Salt Lake City, Utah. Bernstein has frequently prepared choruses for Maestro Jorge Mester, and Mester has requested regular collaborations through 2009. Bernstein's choruses have also performed under Esa-Pekka Salonen and Zubin Mehta.
Last year was a busy one for Bernstein. In January he traveled to Arad, Romania to conduct the state philharmonic and chorus in Haydn's Creation. In May, just before traveling to Naples, Florida for a week-long conducting fellowship with the Naples Philharmonic, Bernstein led a full-length program of his own choral-orchestral music at Occidental College, a performance Bach?s St. John Passion in Boston with baritone Sanford Sylvan, and a two-week concert tour of Australia with the Occidental Glee Clubs.
In 2008 Bernstein became assistant conductor of the newly-amalgamated Orchestras of Pasadena, and in the space of four months his choirs sang three major works with the Pasadena Symphony: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Mozart's C-Minor Mass and Verdi's Requiem. A recent review in Naples called Bernstein 'a rising star in this country' and prognosticated 'If this group is any indication of Bernstein?s ability to mold a group into a unified whole, the future bodes well for him.'
