In the summer of 1976, 50 undergraduate singers from Harvard boarded a plane for their group’s first international tour. The Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum (HRCM), formed in 1971 and then only five years old, took an eight-week journey to some of Europe’s most celebrated churches, cathedrals, and concert venues. Fifty years later, members of that 1976 group went on tour again, singing in a series of four concerts between July 10 and 12, 2026, in some of the original venues, singing many of the original selections.
The idea for the reunion tour came about at the memorial service for the Collegium’s longtime conductor, F. John Adams, Ph.D. ’72, who served on the faculty at Harvard as a lecturer in music from 1972-1978 and passed away in 2011. Several former singers found themselves gathered in a Paris bar—and as the conversation turned to memories of 1976, eventually, someone posed a question: “Why don’t we do it again?”
The group has gone on two reunion tours before: once in 2014 in Paris (the “ReTour”), and again in 2018 in London (the “ReReTour”). Of the original HRCM chorus of 50 singers, 41 are still alive in 2026. Twenty-two reconvened in France for the “ReReReTour” this July.
They performed in four of the same locations, including Sainte-Chapelle and Chartres Cathedral—which required “repeated conversations and personal visits to France before permission was finally granted,” says David Langstaff ’77, M.B.A ’81, who joined the Musicum in 1972 and helped to co-organize the 2026 ReReReTour.
Returning to France, Deborah Geismar ’77 found that both the music and the places remained surprisingly vivid. “Some of the repertoire we sang then is so embedded in my adolescent memory,” she wrote, that it “has come back to me more easily than I expected.”
Walking into the first rehearsal of the reunion, Laurie McNeil ’77, A.M. ’77, said, her initial reaction was, “How did we all get so old?” But as rehearsals continued, she “began to see again the faces of the 20-year-olds we once were…and remember what it was like to breathe as one and produce such great art together.”
The Collegium performed 26 concerts during the original 1976 tour, at venues including Notre-Dame de Paris, Chartres Cathedral, Sainte-Chapelle, the Festival d’Avignon, and the Festival Estival in Paris. Highlights included a collaboration with the Nouvel Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in a performance that was broadcast across the country for the opening of the Festival Estival.
The 1976 tour was entirely student-organized, from fundraising and logistics to securing performance venues. To establish credibility abroad, the organizers assembled an advisory board that included Leonard Bernstein, Nadia Boulanger, Randall Thompson, Elliott Carter, Cecilia Bok, and other distinguished figures in the musical world.
Today, members of the Collegium say the tour had a lasting impact on their lives. Christopher Morris ’77, M.Arch. ’81, who helped to lead the original tour’s fundraising campaign and co-managed the 2026 reunion tour, said “saying ‘yes’ [to the original tour] turns out to have been among the first important decisions of my life.” Geismar, now a doctor in Chicago, said the experience and tour inspired her to sing continuously since graduation; she has spent nearly three decades with a community chorus near Chicago, now serving on its board. And Debra F. Vilinsky ’77 said that the group’s lessons of “deep listening, leadership, followership, meeting responsibilities, managing expectations” were “elevated to an even higher level when we were on tour.”
The tour had lasting effects in other ways: members used the fundraising surplus to establish the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum Foundation, an alumni nonprofit created to preserve the Collegium’s programs. Cynthia Langstaff, A.M. ’78, who met her husband David at the afterparty for the 1976 tour in Elliot Common Room, says that “this neophyte group of 19- or 20- year- olds had pulled off a monumental organizational job with competence and aplomb beyond their years.”
After the ensemble’s first performance at Chartres Cathedral on July 10, Morris joked: “For 50 years after the fact of the 1976 European Tour, we sounded pretty good!” Returning to music they had not performed in decades felt surprisingly natural, according to McNeil. “It was like being reacquainted with old friends.”
