Facilities and Resources

Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts

Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts, located on the Missouri State campus near the Walnut Street Historic District, is a 2,220-seat performing arts center presenting an annual season featuring touring Broadway shows, children's productions, a classical recital series, and a wide variety of individual performances including jazz, dance, classical, and theatrical artists. Hammons Hall also hosts the Springfield Symphony, Missouri State music and theatre department performances, and touring pop, rock, and comedy shows.

Students in Missouri State’s music department will have ample opportunity to perform in this unique facility, one of the most outstanding performing arts centers in the region.

In addition to its other amenities, the hall is home to the University’s state-of-the-art electronic music studio. This is a fully-operational recording studio and hands-on classroom for music majors and non-majors alike that gives you access to a variety of electronic recording tools and programs.

Ellis Hall

Completed in 1959 (and renovated in 2017), Ellis Hall was the first building on campus named for a person. It was named to honor Dr. Roy Ellis, who served as president of the college from 1926 to 1961. At the time of his retirement, Dr. Ellis had been a college president longer than any other person in the United States.

Ellis Hall, located at the heart of campus, is a four-story structure that serves as the music department's home. On the first level are faculty studios, practice rooms, and a rehearsal room. The second floor contains the administrative offices, shared classrooms, and more faculty studios. The second floor is also home to Hamra Hall (a small recital hall) and the larger 250-seat C. Minor Recital Hall with a 40-rank Canadian-built Casavant pipe organ that was installed when Ellis Hall was constructed. All concerts/recitals since 1988 have been archived on DAT in the recital hall's recording facility.

The third and fourth floors house classrooms, practice rooms and faculty studios, including a piano lab.

Wehr Band Hall

Wehr Band Hall, built in 1996 through the generous support of the Wehr family, is an attractive and functional facility that supports the band and music programs of the university. It is the home of the Missouri State Pride Bands and includes offices, a reception area, work rooms, a library, 3 large rehearsal rooms, 17 regular rehearsal rooms, a percussion ensemble rehearsal space plus six percussion practice rooms, lounge, and recording studio.

 

 

The Missouri State University Music Collection

This collection is located on the second level (northwest corner) of Meyer Library, and provides excellent research resources for students in the music department.

Books

The music collection includes more than 5,000 books on musical subjects. These include biographies, histories, dictionaries and encyclopedias, works on music theory and analysis, pedagogy and musical genres.

Scores

The collection includes a diverse collection of musical scores. These range from popular songbooks to study scores of symphonic masterpieces, and include the collected works of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven among others. The collection also houses a special reserve collection of Broadway musical theatre scores.

Sound and Video Recordings

Musical sound and video recordings are part of the media collection. These materials include complete performances of operas and shows, orchestral, chamber and solo instrumental music, and other performances of ethnic, popular and western art music. Equipment is available for listening to these materials.

Periodicals

The MSU libraries subscribes to more than 100 musical periodicals. Current issues are made available as soon as they are received from the publisher. Back issues are cumulated and bound. Both current and back issues are shelved on the lower level.

Reference

A collection of dictionaries, encyclopedias, catalogs, research and study guides are shelved in the music collection area. These materials may be used for basic questions as well as detailed research. Reference books do not circulate. Music user guides are available to help identify reference materials for research in specific subject areas.

The Max Hunter Collection

The Max Hunter Collection is an archive of almost 1,600 Ozark Mountain folk songs, recorded between 1956 and 1976. A traveling salesman from Springfield, Hunter took his reel-to-reel tape recorder into the hills and backwoods of the Ozarks, preserving the heritage of the region by recording the songs and stories of many generations of Ozark history. As important as the songs themselves are the voices of the Missouri and Arkansas folks who shared their talents and recollections with Hunter.

Designed to give increased public access to this unique and invaluable resource, this site is a joint project of the Missouri State University Department of Music and the Springfield-Greene County Library where the permanent collection is housed.

For more information on this collection, see its website at maxhunter.missouristate.edu.