Facilities - University of Houston
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Moores School of Music
Mural-covered grand staircase

Facilities

Exterior view of the Moores School of Music Bulding

Moores School Building

Ensconced in the northwest corner of the University's Arts District, the Moores School of Music houses a complete musical school within a single 142,000-square-foot building.  Ample parking across the street and an adjacent stop on the free cougar shuttle provides convenient access to school, and the city’s new metro trains are just a short walk away. The building sits adjacent to the verdant Wilhemina’s Grove and the Schools of Theatre & Dance and Art, creating a peaceful community area for artistic exploration.
Moores Opera House

Moores Opera House

The 800-seat Moores Opera House, the crown jewel of our facilities, is arguably the finest university opera production facility in the country. It features a Frank Stella art installation, one of the largest stages in Houston, an enormous orchestra pit, and sublime acoustics. It allows performances of the largest operas while still maintaining a sense of intimacy. Most importantly, it gives young voices a chance to develop properly by not subjecting them to the demands of an acoustically unforgiving large hall.
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Moores Opera House

Designed to emulate the acoustic space of an old European opera house, the Moores Opera House boasts an orchestra pit large enough for 70 to 80 musicians, full fly capacity and state of the art sound equipment. Featuring a movable, flexible-size orchestra shell, it also serves as the performance space for our orchestra, wind ensembles, choral groups, and chamber music.

More about the Moores Opera House

Recital Spaces

  • Dudley Recital Hall

    Dudley Recital Hall

    The Dudley Recital Hall has delightful acoustics, but is a more intimate space than the majestic Moores Opera House, seating just over 200 audience members.  Dudley is the venue for most of the student, faculty, and guest artist performances, as well as for lecture-recitals and guest lectures.

  • Organ Recital Hall

    Organ Recital Hall

    The Organ Recital Hall in the Fine Arts Building features a beautiful Beckerath Organ, and is one of six pipe organs on the UH campus. The hall is dedicated to the organ program’s students for their practice and performance use.

  • Choral Recital Hall

    Choral Recital Hall

    The Choral Recital Hall provides our choirs with an exceptional workspace, but also serves as a beautiful forum for intimate recitals. Like Dudley and the Opera House, the hall is equipped with a handmade Steinway grand piano and provides an excellent acoustic experience.

    Photo by Zelda Faith Jones

Academic Spaces

  • Classroom

    Classrooms & Rehearsal Rooms

    All rehearsal rooms and classrooms at the Moores School are soundproofed and equipped with high quality instruments, including handmade Steinway grand pianos.
  • Music Library

    Music Library

    Conveniently located within the Moores School of Music building, the music library provides an extensive music collection of more than 16,000 books; 34,000 scores; 20,000 recordings, and many thousands more available online.
  • Beta Space

    Beta Space

    Located in the library, the Beta Space is a flexible, multi-purpose study space geared towards performing arts students. With multimedia equipment, whiteboards, a piano keyboard, and recording microphone, the Beta space is available by reservation for students of all majors. 
    Closed Fall semester 2020 until further notice.

Public Art

  • Mural-covered ceiling of the Moores Lobby

    Stella Project

    Famed American abstract painter Frank Stella has made the house's grand entrance hall and lobby a masterpiece with his brilliant colors, sweeping arabesques, and geometric shapes. The 5000-square-foot Stella Project inside the theater of the Moores Opera House was a city-wide collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Contemporary Arts Museum, The Menil Collection, The Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County, the Blaffer Gallery, and the Moores School of Music Society.

    Within the theater, Stella created a work for the dome of the hall, an oval applied to the catwalk and lighting baffle and suspended over the audience. Intrigued also by the architectural form of the lobby, he created a work there that covers the entire length of the sixteen-foot vaulted ceiling and flows onto the wall of the mezzanine, creating a kind of Sistine Chapel for the 21st century. The work is unlike any performance space, not only in Houston but in the world.

  • Stillman Green Room

    With permission from the Stillman family and foundation, the school houses the largest retrospective of Ary Stillman's work on public display and exhibits some of the finest examples of each period of his long and fruitful life. As Dr. Peter Guenther wrote, "Mastery of the medium, sensitivity, and the quiet, strong determination to permit the inner reality to find its expression in a modern and very personal form, mark the works of Ary Stillman exhibited here for the first time in Houston. Although the selections given here span more years than the average age of our students, they are only a small part of the painter's creative horizon. The exhibition is therefore not a retrospective one and no viewer need impose a historical attitude on himself, but may permit these works to span the gap between the knowledge of today and the experience and wisdom of ages-long-past, through images which a painter's heart and mind have gathered and gained through the years."

  • Winged Victory sculpture

    The bronze sculpture "Winged Victory" (1996) by American artist Stephen De Staebler dominates the Jane Blaffer Owen Plaza at the entrance to the Moores Opera House. Part of an extended series of fractured, winged figures he calls “angels”, they trace their inspiration to the Winged Victory of Samothrace. De Stabeler meant them to be “a dark optimism in the midst of pessimism”. In a 1995 interview, De Staebler explains “when I shifted from clay to bronze, I learned quickly that the reason I needed bronze was to separate the figure even further from the ground and let it stand on its own form, which isn’t possible in clay. Bronze offers this great freedom to cantilever masses.”

  • Isaac Maxwell Lighting

    The lobby and theater feature wall sconces and a chandelier commissioned from Isaac Maxwell, a Texas artist and craftsman specializing in iconic lighting fixtures. Light emanating from perforations in the worked metals create intricate patterns and reflections in the theater and lobby.
Steinway in the building foyer

As part of our dedication to providing students with exceptional facilities, we're in the process of renovating our building to be an all-Steinway piano location.

Give to the Moores School Steinway Initiative