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.
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 ✕ [ • ] 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.
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.