The new Kenan Music Building in UNC's College of Arts and Sciences will be dedicated in a free public ceremony April 1 at 4 p.m. A panel discussion, open house and student and faculty musical performances will follow.
The building faces Columbia Street between Hanes and Abernethy Halls. The event will begin in the building’s large rehearsal hall with a fanfare composed by student musicians, played by faculty and students from the music department in the College.
Speakers will be Chancellor Holden Thorp; Roger Perry, chair of the UNC Board of Trustees; Bruce Carney, interim dean of the College; Richard M. Krasno, executive director of the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust of Chapel Hill; and Kenan Trustee Thomas S. Kenan III of Chapel Hill.
Members of the Marching Tar Heels, UNC’s student band, will then enter, surround the platform party and play Carolina’s alma mater, “Hark the Sound.” For a schedule of subsequent activities and names of the performers, visit http://music.unc.edu.
Costs for the building totaled $31.4 million, with $19.8 million coming from the Higher Education Bond Referendum approved in 2000, $7.6 million from University sources and $4 million from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust.
The building, which opened to students and faculty in late 2008, provides much-needed additional space for the music department. The new facility has proper acoustics now lacking in Hill Hall, the department’s home since 1930.
The 100,000 square-foot Kenan building features a large instrumental rehearsal hall, faculty studios for applied teaching, classrooms, a digital theory laboratory, a recording studio and a percussion suite. The rehearsal hall accommodates the Marching Tar Heels and other large ensembles.
The department will continue to use Hill Hall, as well as the new Kenan Music Building. The new structure is named in honor of Thomas S. Kenan III, who graduated from Carolina in 1959.
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