Facilities
O'Neill Hall of Music and Sacred Music is a 100,000-square-foot, seven-story building on the south side of Notre Dame Stadium. It features two very different concert venues, smart classrooms, rehearsal rooms, a lecture hall, faculty and staff offices, a workroom for graduate students, and a light-filled, full-service music library with many spaces for study and research. The Notre Dame Stadium’s jumbotron is located on the north face of our building, and the 4th floor is home to Foley’s at Notre Dame Stadium, a premier venue for rent.
Performance spaces
The LaBar Recital Hall (entrance at door 7 east of Leahy Gate C) features a traditional stage, fixed seating, and a formal atmosphere suited to classical concert music for small ensembles by students, faculty, and guest artists.
The 180-seat venue has fully customizable lights, live streaming capabilities, premier audio and visual recording facilities, a dropdown 24x16-foot projection screen, a Steinway Model D Grand Piano, built-in reverberant acoustical chambers and dampers, and three different window shade variants (solar, acoustic, blackout).
The LaBar Performance Hall (entrance at door 10 west of Leahy Gate C) is a customizable interdisciplinary performance space for alternative types of musical events involving music in combination with other media, such as projected text and visual images, and other forms of artistic expression, such as acting, lighting, and dance. It features flexible seating and staging options in a “white-box” style setting designed to support avant-garde performance and experimentation. It includes a 36x18-foot video screen, built-in reverberant acoustical chambers and dampers, a retractable acoustic curtain to help absorb sound, and three different window shade variants (solar, acoustic, blackout).
Music library
Housed on the third floor of O’Neill, the music library is a branch of the Hesburgh Libraries. Its collection consists of over 40,000 scores, 25,000 books, and 20,000 media items (CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and vinyl records), not to mention our large collection of electronic books, scores, sound recordings, and other digital resources. In partnership with the Department of Music and Sacred Music Program, our collection supports the study and performance of Western art music, with focused collection areas in Sacred and Liturgical Vocal music and Organ music. The music library also has materials for interdisciplinary studies covering a wide range of genres, time periods, and cultures to support teaching and research throughout the University. The collection continues to grow in diversity to reflect the changes in the field and the interests of our patrons. Additionally, we are expanding areas in materials studying musical theater, popular music, jazz, film music, contemporary music, and music in social and cultural contexts from around the world. In addition to our spacious reading room, there are three smaller group rooms with Audio/Video equipment including turntables and disc readers, a high-resolution scanner, a small music computer lab, and a seminar room along with study areas throughout the library to create a variety of spaces for students and faculty to research and study together.
Rehearsal halls, practice rooms, and classrooms
The Department of Music and the Sacred Music Program have their main offices on the 3rd to 5th floors in O’Neill Hall. There are 16 practice rooms, studios, four rooms with practice organs, and dedicated rooms for harp, harpsichord, fortepiano. Our two Michuda Rehearsal Halls are designed for larger and smaller choirs while the variously-sized classrooms and our lecture hall are ideal for courses of various sizes.
DeBartolo Performing Arts Center
The DeBartolo Performing Arts Center (DPAC) features one of the most acoustically brilliant concert halls in North America, Leighton Concert Hall, which seats around 850 people and has been home to concerts with renowned artists ranging from Yo-Yo-Ma and Kathleen Battle to Dave Brubeck and Wynton Marsalis. The Reyes Organ and Choral Hall has a Paul Fritts tracker organ in the North German style, and a Neapolitan organ from c. 1685. The Patricia George Decio Theater is the home of Opera ND and the performances by the musical theater program in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre.