Archives — The Radcliffe Pitches

WELCOME TO THE ARCHIVES

Here we share some of our favorite highlights from our first 50 years.

We are proud of our heritage and our pioneering founders who broke through barriers to establish the magic that is the Radcliffe Pitches. Our founders take their place with other trailblazing women in the music industry who created and persisted with great impact. We strive to continue their tradition of paying it forward and opening doors for future generations OF ALL GENDERS.

Our Founders Kathy Manning ‘78 (original music director), and Diane Nabatoff ‘78 (original business manager) wrote the following introduction to our 45th Anniversary Memory Book in 2020.

Read more about our beginnings in the memory book linked below!

In today’s world, with a wealth of a cappella groups and everything from a cappella competitions on TV to a series of Pitch Perfect movies, it’s hard to imagine a time when a cappella groups were relatively unknown.
It’s even harder to imagine a time where there was only one a cappella group at Harvard, and an exclusively male group at that. But that’s exactly what we found when we entered Harvard as freshmen in 1974.
It was a time before a cappella was well-known, a time before a cappella was cool, a time before a cappella was for women singers. We decided to change that.
We arrived at Harvard as freshmen in the fall of 1974 at a time of transition for women at the university. We were the last group of women to be accepted to Radcliffe, and the first to graduate from Harvard.
We were some of the first women to live in Harvard Yard. The ratio of men to women was 4 to 1, and everything on campus was, for the most part, male-oriented.
There was only one a cappella singing group on campus at the time: the all-male Harvard Krokodiloes.
We were both singers and loved their style, creativity, and camaraderie, but it was very clear we were not going to be able to join the Kroks, so we decided to start our own group.
We quickly found out that you can’t just put up a sign and start a group. We had to navigate university rules and regulations and petition for a charter from Dean Epps, who wasn’t so sure we would actually accomplish the task.
When we finally got our official status, it was the spring of 1975 and we held auditions…