VALDOSTA – Muffled tuba music can he heard in the hallway. A low-volume run of notes, repeated in rehearsal, from behind the walls and closed door of a practice room in Powell Hall.

A. Blake Pearce, College of the Arts dean, steps into another rehearsal room, shuts the door and the tuba music is silenced. The doors are designed to cancel sound, he said.

“You can faintly hear music in the hallway,” Pearce said, “but inside the practice room, you can’t hear anyone else rehearsing in another room.”

Powell Hall is the new home to the VSU Department of Music.  

Of course, anyone familiar with Valdosta State knows Powell Hall is not new. In 1941, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited Valdosta to dedicate Powell Hall which was then the campus library.

When music students returned to VSU this past August, the majority of the music classes, practice rooms and faculty had relocated to Powell Hall. 

Some music department faculty and classes – such as strings – are still in the music department’s long-time home in the Fine Arts Building. Whitehead Auditorium in the Fine Arts Building is still the premier performance hall for VSU Music and the Valdosta Symphony Orchestra. 

In Powell Hall, the former reading room is now a recital hall that can be outfitted for audience sizes up to 200 seats. Exposed beams lift the high ceiling. Rows of tall windows fill the recital hall with natural light. 

Only a few seats are lined up for a piano rehearsal session. Students sit in the chairs. A student plays piano. Through windows in the lobby, visitors can see the group, see movement at the piano, but no music, not a note, escapes the sound battening that seals the doors. 

Soon, the instructor activates the fogging device for the windows from the recital hall into the lobby. The students, player, instructor, exposed beams, natural light and piano vanish behind the opaque windows.

The lobby celebrates the housing of the music department while respecting Powell Hall’s creation when Valdosta State was Georgia State Woman’s College – built as a Works Progress Administration project during the Roosevelt Administration. Photos of Eleanor Roosevelt and past college officials are mounted on walls along with photos of musicians.

But the focus of the building is music. 

As the university notes: “The building features new student gathering spaces, practice rooms, rehearsal rooms for medium chamber ensembles, a conference room, a jazz ensemble room, a music education room.”

These rooms include approximately half-a-million dollars in baby grand pianos, Pearce said. 

Students will find numerous storage lockers for other instruments, books, music, etc.

VSU hopes the increased number of lockers will be needed. 

Pearce said the renovated Powell Hall should help VSU recruit more students to the music program.