Facilities & Venues

Murphy Hall is a five-level facility containing offices for faculty in applied music, music education & music therapy, music theory & composition, opera, musicology, and ensembles. It contains choral and instrumental rehearsal halls, the Thomas Gorton Music and Dance Library, the Electronic Music Studio, Vocology Lab, classrooms, and practice rooms.

Books, scores, sound recordings, and periodicals number in excess of 100,000, fully servicing all degree programs offered. The facility contains listening equipment, study carrels, and computers for online searches. The Library is staffed with professional music librarians who are able to assist with any need.

The Archive of Recorded Sound, a part of the Music and Dance Library, is an exceptional collection of sound recordings of great historical significance. It contains more than 75,000 items, including the Wright Jazz Collection, the Seaver Opera Collection, and Bierley Early Band Collection. The Archive contains all equipment necessary for playback of its various early recording technologies, including Pathe, Edison, and cylinder players. The Archive is a tremendous resource for performers and scholars.

The Archive of Recorded Sound is held off-site at the Library Annex. Patrons can request to have items sent to the Music and Dance Library for in-library use. Please use the Libraries’ Retrieve From Shelf service to request items from the Archive. Feel free to contact Chris Bohling, Music and Dance Library Operations Manager, if you have any questions about retrieving an item.

The Richard F. Wright Jazz Archive at the University of Kansas, part of the Music and Dance Library, is one of the most complete of its kind in the Midwest. Its holdings thoroughly cover all major jazz periods from the 1920's and 1930's on 78-rpm recordings.

Both choral pedagogy and voice pedagogy offer opportunities to explore ongoing dialogue among musicians and voice science experts, in addition to honing superb teaching, conducting, performing, and musicological skills. The lab affords state-of-the-art resources for research-based approaches to real-world singing contexts and has both stationary and mobile capabilities.

Choral & Voice Pedagogy Information

Vocology Lab Information

There are 150 pianos, mostly Steinways, Yamahas, and Baldwins, including six concert grands. Other specialized equipment includes a Roland keyboard lab; the Collegium Musicum instrument collection which includes recorders, shawms, sackbuts, cornetts, crumhorns, lutes, violas da gamba, cornamuses, a ranket, a Baroque trumpet, and percussion instruments; a clavichord; four harpsichords; six practice organs; and a full complement of band and orchestral instruments.