What We Do
The Harvard College Opera Society seems to grow in its scope every year. That’s because we always have new people like you, bringing new talents, backgrounds, and passions, joining us.
Below, you’ll find a mostly exhaustive snapshot of every activity we engage in — as a company, a community, and a Board — in the course of a single year. Click on any of the previews below to be taken to another relevant page in this section where you’ll find information outlining precisely how you can get involved in that activity, no matter your background, skillset, or availability, and regardless of your degree of prior experience.
An Annual Opera
cast / chorus / orchestra / accompanists / directors / producers / tech / a.v.
How to Make Opera:
Our Intensive Stage Directing Winternship
Exclusively for first- or second-year Harvard students with no prior experience in opera
Shadow and Associate Roles in Staff and Production
Flexible, low-commitment roles for first- and second-year students
A Full Season of Arts Programming
ARTS FIRST Festival Performance
Our biggest concert of the year, second only to the mainstage
Seasonal Recitals
Including a fall collaboration with the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute and winter and spring showcases
First-Year Showcase
A unique opportunity for first-year musicians
Informal Recitals
Regular, casual, and low-stakes practice
Guest Artist Series
Masterclasses, workshops, Q&As, and discussions with professionals from across the performing arts
Events
HCO ✕ YOU:
Decentralized Artmaking, Platformed
Our newest project: using our position — at the intersection of classical music, producing, performing arts, tech theater, solo and ensemble voice, and the Office for the Arts — to disseminate information, bring together artists across across disciplines, and empower a vibrant community of small, informal, and independently organized artistic initiatives at Harvard.
Contribute by joining our talent network, by posting your initiatives to our bulletin, or by pitching your idea to us and becoming one of the first creators to use our platform
HCO ✕ [ • ] Collaborations
Performances and events hosted jointly with other Harvard student groups
Family Meet-and-Greets
Making time — and snacks — for our smallest fans
Outings, Screenings, and Socials
Meals, movies, mixers, and subsidized trips to the Boston Lyric Opera
Annual Opera Gala
Black-tie attire, champagne, and music to accompany the opera and drive fundraising
Long-Term Projects
Growth, Finance, and Digital Media Development
On the tail-end of a fully virtual season, our return to in-person mainstage performances, Le Nozze di Figaro (2022), was also HCO’s first mainstage performance to be live-streamed. We were surprised to find that our audience, tuning in from across the U.S. and hailing from a wide variety of countries and timezones worldwide, included not only parents and alumni, but also high schoolers, students at other colleges, and opera fans with no prior in-person connection to HCO. In other words, we had already built the germ of a wide online audience without realizing it and had only just begun to serve them properly.
We’re working this year not only to serve that audience, but to grow it by making fuller use of social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and, soon, TikTok), building out our hybrid live performance capacity, and expanding our range of interactions with digital audiences. We’re also working to diversify our revenue streams via new initiatives in fundraising, merchandise sales, and other collaborations, which rely in part on use of tech.
If you have experience growing an organization using technology, or are otherwise passionate about business, social media, and/or startups, please contact our Growth and Digital Initiatives Chair Rain Wu ’24 using the button below.
Opera, Equity, and Access
Every year since 2020, we’ve backed our commitments to diversity, inclusion, access, and belonging by donating 20% of our mainstage profits and a flat 3% of our annual operating budget to an organization actively working to tear down barriers to inclusion in classical music. We aim to choose organizations with a focus on promoting access to classical music education for populations historically excluded along lines of race or class. Our most recent recipients were The Sphinx Organization and Black Classical Music Educators.
We’re now expanding our efforts to promote inclusion in classical music on campus, opera especially. Our immediate focus is on working with other student groups and the Office for the Arts at Harvard to reduce financial and social barriers to classical vocal and instrumental instruction. This has a few concrete forms: one subproject is in structuring a more inclusive and effective flow of information on campus about existing resources for musicians, especially those with underrepresented backgrounds or facing financial disadvantage.
Another more ambitious project we’ve already begun work on involves designing collaborative financial arrangements between groups and administrators in the arts at Harvard to directly and collectively fund the lessons of Harvard students facing financial barriers to classical vocal instruction focused in solo and theatrical performance.
If you are passionate about any of these issues and feel that your personal background, skillset, or relatinships could help us achieve these goals, please contact our Belonging Chair Rebecca Araten ’23 using the button below.
Living History: Records and Governance
For our 30th anniversary, HCO is also working on two projects to do with our history: one that looks back, and another forward.
The retrospective project seeks to take stock of our archives: to catalog all of the scores, libretti, orchestra parts, and other documents we’ve collected over the years, as well as our own documents, such as old show programs, reviews, directors’s statements, and so forth. This project also works with our alumni project to help build a directory of all of HCO’s alumni over the years.
The prospective half of the project aims to put some of HCO’s practices on firmer institutional footing by revising our Constitution with new amendments to make it better reflect and serve our current organization’s needs and practices. We are also developing a number of governance procedures for our mainstage to streamline and professionalize our process, including a series of producer and director contracts and enforcement mechanisms. For students interested in law, this is a unique opportunity to think about mechanism design and institutional governance in a real context with actual stakes, even if there are no courts or lawyers involved.
If these practical archival and unconventional legal work opportunities appeal to you, please contact our historian Catherine Deskur ’24 using the button below.
HCO ✕ Alumni: Outreach, Chats, Features, and Community
We’re working on building out interactions between alumni and current students. Since 2022, these efforts have been split into a few specific initiatives:
Our Alumni Outreach and Newsletter initiatives, begun originally in 2019, aim to reach as many former members of HCO as possible and offer them an easy way to stay up-to-date with HCO via email, as well as invite them to infrequent on-campus alumni events, such as the Alumni Brunch preceding the Opera Gala and Saturday showing of the opera.
Our Student-Alumn Coffee Chats and Alumni Directory initiatives aim to connect current students interested in pursuing the arts after graduation to former HCO members who have gone onto graduate school in the arts or who have already begun professional artistic careers. Right now, we’re working on combing the archives to gather information on our vast alumni network, with the next steps being to track down up-to-date contact information on older alumni and begin outreach to determine individual-level preferences regarding privacy and participation/availability. We’ve also begun to recruit more recent alumni to begin connecting students for chats about graduate school in the arts.
Our Alumni Features initiative aims to shine a spotlight on alumni who’ve demonstrably advanced the core mission and principles of HCO through achievements in their post-graduate careers, e.g. by creating operas to keep the art form alive, by working to reduce barriers to access in classical music, or by contributing to the education of the next generation of artists. Right now, we’re working on writing our first two features.
Finally, the Alumni Community initiative aims to centralize and publicly display information about all the performances, debuts, premieres, recordings, and other major artistic events that feature members of the extensive HCO alumni community. Right now, we’re working to build a portal directly into this website that makes it easy for alumni to input their own events to a central calendar to ensure we can always have as comprehensive and accurate a listing as possible. Next, we’ll begin recruiting more alumni to input events and consider creating an Alumni Digest that parallels our existing newsletters, but runs bimonthly and tracks alumni activity.
Opportunities to get involved in this project are primarily for existing alumni of HCO, but others may also reach out to our Alumni Outreach Chair Annora Lee ’24, whose email can be found on our Contact page. If you’re an alumn, you can find more information in the alumni portal.
HCO ✕ YOU: Hub, Network, Platform, and Community
HCO ✕ YOU is Harvard College Opera’s plan to put its reach, resources, and relationships to use for the broader community.
As it stands, to organize a small-scale artistic event — a recital, a concert, a composition debut, a semi-staged reading, and so on — an artist at Harvard must either recruit all their fellow participants by word of mouth, or they must join an existing organization to be equipped with the freedom, resources, and connections to realize their ideas. Less frequently, some organizations — will offer one-off opportunities for creators to contribute original works — musicals, choral works, etc. — for existing organizations to perform, but the power and resources to execute still ultimately remain with the organization, rather than the creator.
The opportunity provided by these organizations — a class of entities to which HCO, of course, belongs — can be immensely powerful (and indeed, perhaps the only way to execute some of the biggest projects, such as the full opera productions we stage annually), they should not be the only game in town. Likewise, the ability to make art at Harvard should not depend on prior social engagement with the arts community or on participation within existing organizations. Under this organization, some projects are continually left un-attempted: even for HCO, by way of example, there is a sweet spot of operas we consider to provide strong opportunities for our choral and orchestral musicians and to employ a large enough cast to meet our mission of providing performance opportunities for undergraduates, but many incredible works do not fall within this sweet spot, often on account of employing too small a cast. Although those works are eminently viable on the basis of available artists, they fail to meet the needs of organizations themselves and so never find an outlet — but this need not be the case.
Our vision with HCO ✕ YOU is to offer an alternative — one where creators, performers, and producers have the tools and knowledge to find each other, and the resources to realize their visions independently. Our hypothesis is that by democratizing access to information and supporting the organic connection of artists across organizational boundaries, we can help to create a thriving artistic scene on Harvard campus well beyond anything we or any other club could produce in the confines of our own seasons and missions. We think such an environment has the further potential to enrich the projects of major organizations like our own, too, by providing members with more opportunities to gain experience and comfort performing, and by increasing the engagement of the overall campus with the arts.
With this overarching ambition in mind, the detailed HCO ✕ YOU project is divided into four distinct aspects, each of which solves a different facet of the same four-part information problem: How do creators, performers, producers, and audiences find each other in the absence of a dedicated organization for that purpose?
HCO ✕ YOU:
I. The Bulletin
II. Talent and Skill Registries
III. The Digest
IV. HCO Platform Services
Taken together, the four pillars establish a new infrastructure and creative environment for independent artmaking on campus — one where smaller projects are not dependent on clubs or personal connections for their realization, and one where any artist, from the moment they step on campus, has everything they need to join or initiate a creative project on their own terms.
Learn more about each of the four pillars by clicking the button below, which will take you to our HCO ✕ YOU platform. If you would like to help us in building and/or expanding the infrastructure involved in the platform, please contact President James Rose ’22/’23 and Artistic Initiatives Chair Lucas Amory ’25 at harvardcollegeopera@gmail.com.
Still Not Satisfied?
Email us! Let us know what else you’d like to do through HCO that we’re not already doing, and if it aligns with our mission, we’ll see how we can equip you to work on it with us. In the meantime, read more about the opportunities above in our other dedicated pages.