About
Our Mission
Opportunities to study and make music at Notre Dame are wide-ranging.
Our curriculum offers excellent preparation for majors who go on to prestigious academic or performance graduate programs, and our streamlined course offerings allow double majors and minors to combine their study of music with careers in another field. Numerous students from all over campus pursue their interest in music by taking our general education classes and playing in our ensembles, including the Marching and Jazz Bands, the Notre Dame Symphony Orchestra, the Glee Club, and the Chorale.
Our distinguished faculty members teach lessons and courses with small class sizes in well-equipped studios and classrooms. Music students are part of the College of Arts & Letters, which includes 20 departments in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Together with the College’s requirements, the music curriculum for the major and our minors make for a liberal arts education that is both rigorous and broad. Our students have gone on to distinguished careers not only in music but also in many other professions.
We are located in O’Neill Hall of Music at the Leahy Gate on the South side of the Notre Dame Stadium. The Music Department shares O’Neill with the distinguished graduate program in Sacred Music. Our 100,000-square-foot, seven-story building opened in 2018 and was made possible by a gift to the University from Helen Schwab and her husband, Charles, in honor of her brother, Notre Dame alumnus and trustee Joseph I. O’Neill III.
O'Neill Hall of Music is bursting at the seams with activity and energy. It boasts two exquisite performing spaces, a superb music library, as well as many classrooms, studios, and rehearsal spaces, and variously-sized practice rooms used by music groups from across campus. The space also has dedicated rooms for our four practice organs, a harp, harpsichords, and an early 19th-century fortepiano. With ample music lockers, cozy nooks and lounges, and spacious hallways, our music students also find O'Neill a very welcoming place to socialize as well as relax.
The intimacy and beauty of the 175-seat LaBar Recital Hall is the ideal venue for solo concerts and small ensembles by students, faculty, and guest artists. The LaBar Performance Hall accommodates events involving music in combination with other media, such as projected text and visual images, and different forms of artistic expression, such as acting, lighting, and dance. Its white-box setting features flexible seating and staging options ideal for avant-garde performances and experimentation.
Music students live the motto of the College of Arts and Letters “Study everything— Do anything” with a twist: “Study everything — Play anything” to which we add “Play it All.”
Diversity and Inclusion
We are dedicated to advancing an artistic and intellectual climate where people with divergent aesthetics, ideas, and ways of being may converse freely with each other, and where those who have been historically excluded along vectors of difference feel welcome and safe.