Music Department Facilities
The Department of Music is housed in the modern and beautiful Mary Duke Biddle Music Building, which provides superb facilities for its diverse needs. Students meet with instructors in well-equipped classrooms, seminar rooms, and studios. There are twenty practice rooms with grand pianos, four organ practice rooms, several harpsichord practice rooms, a computer music studio* with various MIDI synthesizers and Macintosh computers, ensemble rehearsal studios, and a large rehearsal hall. Public performances take place in either the newly refurbished 900-seat Baldwin Auditorium or the more intimate Nelson Music Room. Student performances frequently take place in the new refurbished Bone Hall.
The building also houses the Music Library with over 85,000 books, scores, journals, and microfilms. The Media Center, with some 20,000 sound recordings and a growing collection of video tapes, adjoins a state-of-the-art audio facility which can accommodate 32 listeners. The library's special collections include an archive donated by the Pulitzer-prize-winning composer Robert Ward and an extensive collection of research materials assembled by the Viennese music bibliographer Alexander Weinmann. The Music Library's web pages include links to internet resources for music research.
DUMIC, the Duke University Musical Instrument Collections, are housed in the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building. DUMIC includes The G. Norman and Ruth G. Eddy Collection, comprised of over 500 late eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century instruments with particular depth in woodwinds, brass, and early pianos, and The Frans and Willemina de Hen-Bijl Collection of Musical Instruments, which includes over 200 musical instruments from all over the world. The Department also has a variety of wind, string, and percussion instruments available to students for daily practice. Of special interest is an unusual collection of historical instruments. There are no fewer than five tracker organs (Brombaugh, Fisk, Flentrop) in the Music Building (in addition to the four organs in the Chapel, including the majestic 66-stop Flentrop and the new Italian-style Brombaugh). In addition, the collection includes harpsichords in various historical styles (German and French doubles by Dowd and Kingston, Italian and Flemish singles by Edskes and Martin, etc.), two fortepianos by Smith and Wolff in the Viennese styles of circa 1790 and 1820, a bible regal by Bruce Shull, a monochord, renaissance and baroque recorders of various sizes, several viole da gamba, sackbuts, krummhorns, and percussion instruments. These instruments are used by faculty and students in classes and for concerts of early music.
* In Spring 2006, the music department acquired studio space for electronic music instruction and composition in the Smith Arts Warehouse, a renovated tobacco warehouse near East Campus with state-of-the-art facilities. The studio in the department is no longer being updated, though it will remain available to graduate students fpr the time being.