They came in bow ties and crimson gowns, spry of step or aided by walkers, their college memories more or less intact. On Feb. 12, nearly 650 members of the Yale Glee Club, past and present, poured into Woolsey Hall on the university’s campus in New Haven, Conn., with a singular purpose: to celebrate the ensemble’s 150th anniversary. And naturally, to sing.

Sing they did, from the stage and the balconies: the full-throated men’s alumni chorus with its boyish 93-year-old soloist, Stowe Phelps, and yodelers from the class of ’62; the mixed alumni chorus, 450 strong in rafter-rattling spirituals; and the 84 tender undergraduate voices of the glee club itself.

After the boola boolas died down and the rivalry dimmed (“We’ll leave poor Harvard behind so far, they won’t want to play us anymore”), after the last white handkerchief — waved high to the strains of “Bright College Years,” the unofficial alma mater — was tucked away, the choristers wedged themselves at long tables in the cavernous Commons, their reminiscences interrupted by outbursts of glee club favorites. Some were certain they heard the ghosts of alumni like Cole Porter, Charles Ives and Vincent Price singing along.

Harvard can breathe easy when the Yale Glee Club performs at Carnegie Hall in a concert intentionally devoid of old school standards. Intended instead to highlight the ensemble’s contemporary role in collegiate choral music, the program will feature Vaughan Williams’ “Dona Nobis Pacem” and works by Dominick Argento, James MacMillan, Robert Vuichard and Michael Gilbertson, commissioned by the glee club’s current director, Jeffrey Douma.

“This 150th-anniversary year has been primarily about looking back,” Douma said, “but I wanted there to be one event that really looked to the future.”

Ted Hearne’s “Partition” will receive its New York premiere, accompanied by the Yale Symphony Orchestra. It was based on a text by Edward Said “in which he discusses music’s power to transcend boundaries that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to cross,” said Hearne, who earned a master’s degree in composition. It explores the relationship between Yale students and greater New Haven, a city he called “as studied in segregation as it is segregated.”

“There is a certain kind of academic focus on these issues that, even while aggrieving the socioeconomic divisions within a city, nonetheless serves to strengthen them,” he wrote in the program notes for “Partition.”

Plenty to sing about

“Do you sing?”: The question is barked out each year at the Freshman Bazaar, where students are lured into extracurricular activities, including more than a dozen choirs. But perhaps none of the others can claim the devotion of the glee club, the third-oldest such group in the nation, behind Harvard (which isn’t about to let Yale forget it) and the University of Michigan.

Some loves never fade away. In 1937 Prescott Bush — the father of George H.W. Bush and the glee club alumnus Jonathan Bush, and a grandfather of George W. Bush — forged the Yale Glee Club Associates, whose official capacity is to advise the undergraduate ensemble. Other graduates loath to give up the bonhomie of the college a cappella experience formed the Yale Alumni Chorus in 1998.

“There’s something really spectacular about singing together, about creating harmony,” said Clay Kaufman, the associates’ president. “It’s similar to being on a sports team, to accomplishing something as a group that you can’t do on your own.”

History and music

Born in 1861 on the Yale Fence where 13 crooners serenaded passers-by, the club became an international sensation under Marshall Bartholomew, its director from 1921 to 1953. In 1928 the American collegians embarked on their first European tour, bowling over audiences with folk songs and spirituals collected and arranged by the director they called Barty.

In 1939, on the choir’s fourth tour, the men sailed to and from Europe on the Queen Mary, crossing the continent on trains whose shades were drawn by soldiers in Germany so that military preparations were not visible. In Oslo, their escorts were ladies-in-waiting to the Queen of Norway; in Helsinki, they drank tea with the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius at his home.

“We were aware that Hitler was feeling ambitious and had invaded Czechoslovakia,” said Phelps, the 93-year-old, but “at 21 or 22, we were not terribly concerned.”

During World War II, the club’s compass was pointed toward South America, thrilling Brazilians with “Away to Rio!” and inspiring the formation of a choir in La Plata, Argentina. Returning to Europe in 1949, it edited German works out of its programs after audience members found the songs too painful.

In 1969, during Fenno Heath’s four-decade tenure as conductor, the club emulated the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” That year, the university went coed and the next year, so did the group. The backlash from alumni, who were met with a sound and a repertory that were distinctly different, was enormous.

“I was not altogether overjoyed but knew it was obviously inevitable,” Phelps said. “It’s not that I didn’t like girls. It was the opposite: I loved them. It’s that I felt that a men’s chorus had a particular strength, a particular resonance that was unique.”

In the fall of 2003, Douma, now 39, became only the seventh director in the ensemble’s history: a legacy that sometimes causes him to gulp, he said, as he walks between portraits of Bartholomew and Heath hanging on either side of his office door in Hendrie Hall.

“The glee club has always been at the vanguard of new choral music in the United States,” Douma said. “We think of Barty’s arrangements now as old standbys, but when they were produced, they were new and fresh.”

“The glee club has absolutely been the core of my undergraduate experience,” said Emily Howell, the reigning president. “And of any particular memory, I would probably say the reunion was the highlight of the last four years: sharing the traditions that we still celebrate, and seeing how they’ve maintained the social dynamic that is just as much a part of glee club now as it was then.”

Recently, Howell and a few of her fellow choristers made some resolutions. “One of them was, in 25 years to be able to afford to go to the 175th reunion,” she said. “And in 50 years to be able to walk on stage for the 200th.”