 During the 1940s, the Glee Club worked with composer in residence Randall Thompson when director Stephen Tuttle commissioned Thompson to write "The Testament of Freedom", a setting of Thomas Jefferson's words about liberty, for the Virginia Glee Club.In the later years of Tuttle's tenure, the Glee Club recorded an album with RCA of traditional university songs, accompanied by the University of Virginia Band.In 1953, members of the Glee Club formed the Virginia Gentlemen, the oldest "a cappella" group at UVA, which originated as a performing subset of the Glee Club and became an independent organization in the 1980s.