While studying the 1911 manuscript of Maurice Ravel’s “Mother Goose” ballet suite, housed at the Ransom Center, scholar Arbie Orenstein discovered the largest error in all of Ravel’s scores: a bassoon line that’s been missing from the published edition for the last century.

Orenstein’s discovery comes just in time for the centennial of “Mother Goose,” which premiered in Paris 100 years ago this Saturday.

“The first time I looked at that bassoon part, I thought, ‘What on earth is this instrument doing here?’” Orenstein told Cultural Compass. “But it’s perfectly written, complete with dynamics and phrasing, and it makes absolute sense according to all the rules of orchestration. I said, ‘Wow, this is really something.’”

The “Mother Goose” manuscript is housed in the Ransom Center’s Carlton Lake collection, which also includes manuscripts by Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Igor Stravinsky.

In addition to the bassoon line, Orenstein, Professor of Music at Queens College, found other discrepancies between the 1911 manuscript and the widely used 1912 published score. Orenstein plans to publish a new edition this year presenting all of the differences between the manuscript and the published score. Philadelphia Orchestra librarian Clinton F. Nieweg will help communicate the changes to orchestras around the world.

While preparing the new edition, Orenstein consulted with musicians from the New York Philharmonic, and the Philharmonic became the first orchestra to incorporate Orenstein’s changes in a concert on December 28, 2011.

“It was quite exciting to hear that bassoon part for the first time in 100 years (not that I’m 100 years old!),” Orenstein wrote in an e-mail after the performance.

Though the “Mother Goose” manuscript contains more errors than any other manuscript he’s ever worked with, Orenstein says he doesn’t criticize Ravel. Ravel had his mind on the new ballet he’d already begun composing, “Daphnis et Chloë,” the manuscript of which is also housed at the Ransom Center. On top of that, Stravinsky was composing what would become his seminal ballet “The Rite of Spring” and playing it for Ravel.

“All of these exciting things are happening. He just may not have given his fullest attention to ‘Mother Goose,’” Orenstein said. “It’s a battle for perfection which you can never win. Ravel said the same thing: ‘My goal is technical perfection. I can strive unceasingly, but I know I’ll never be able to achieve it.’”

Nevertheless, Orenstein is doing what he can to help Ravel achieve perfection posthumously.

“The greatest battle of any composer is that of wrong notes. That’s why these new editions based on the manuscripts are so important. If you’re going to interpret the music, you have to do what Mahler said: read between the notes. But you have to have all the right notes.”

Working with music publisher Ernst Eulenburg Ltd., Orenstein plans to continue publishing new editions of Ravel’s major orchestral works, some of which are housed at the Ransom Center.

“The point of departure is the Harry Ransom Center. Without that, we wouldn’t be able to do this,” Orenstein said. “There’s a tremendous amount that needs to be looked at, sorted out, and new editions made. There will be plenty more coming out of Texas, I can tell you that.”

Learn more about Orenstein’s discovery in a Wall Street Journal article by reporter Anne S. Lewis.

Second page of Maurice Ravel's Mother Goose manuscript. The missing bassoon line is in the fifth stave from the top.

Print of Franz Liszt, 1841.

Long before Beatlemania, mid-nineteenth-century European audiences went wild for Franz Liszt, the Hungarian pianist/composer with shoulder-length hair. Women fought over his broken piano strings and collected his coffee dregs in glass vials. One woman retrieved Liszt’s discarded cigar stump from a gutter and encased it in a diamond-studded locket monogrammed “F.L.” To describe this phenomenon, German poet Heinrich Heine coined the term “Lisztomania.”

Liszt took the classical music world by storm. Considered the best pianist of all time by his contemporaries, Liszt essentially created the piano recital. He was the first pianist to emerge onstage from the wings, he introduced the custom of performing in profile because he didn’t want the piano to block his face, and…

Fifteenth-century Dominican Processional featuring square musical notation on 4-line red staves.

Bibiana Gattozzi recently graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a Masters in Musicology. Last year, she was a Teaching Assistant for a Signature Course entitled “Music, Art, and Ritual in Mexican Catholicism.” Designed for first-year undergraduates, Signature Courses are interdisciplinary seminars taught by professors from across the university. Gattozzi took her students to the Ransom Center to view medieval and Renaissance liturgical/musical manuscripts.

After the first few class periods of my semester as a teaching assistant (TA) for a first-year Signature Course at The University of Texas at Austin, I realized that the Harry Ransom Center would provide the ideal opportunity for meeting three of the major…

This previously unknown signature was identified as the English publisher Jonathan Cape by University of Texas at Austin English Professor Michael Winship.

Yesterday, the Ransom Center launched the web exhibition The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920–1925. The exhibition uses a door from a bookshop owned by Frank Shay in Greenwich Village in the early 1920s as an entryway into the lives, careers, and relationships of New York bohemians of that era. The door is signed on both sides by more than 240 artists, writers, publishers, and other notable 1920s Village habitués, and the web exhibition uses the signatures to reconstruct the intersecting communities that made Greenwich Village famous as an epicenter of Modernism.

Although about 190 of…

Undated photo of John Cage by Anton Perich.

John Cage pushed classical music’s limits. He stuck screws and weather stripping into pianos, composed a silent piece, and chose notes at random based on ancient Chinese divination. The Ransom Center holds Cage correspondence in several different collections. These letters reveal Cage’s early efforts to establish a center for experimental music, his mushroom expertise, his friendships, and his vision for classical music. Read more about the letters of this leading figure of experimental music.

Photograph of Dimitri Tiomkin conducting orchestra for Duel in the Sun, 1946

Music has been an integral part of motion pictures since the earliest days of filmmaking. While full orchestral scores were written especially for select major productions such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), most early films were shown accompanied by a pianist or organist who had compiled the score from a small sheet music library that was organized by mood. The pianist synchronized the music to the film by using a “cue sheet,” a list of the film’s action and title cards in the order in which they appear. Whether for an exciting chase sequence or a tender love scene, for suspense or nostalgia,…

Title page of the libretto for Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini's L'Euridice, Florence, 1600.

A major collection of Italian opera libretti is now accessible through an online database. The collection of 3,421 items was donated in 1969 by New York rare book dealer Hans P. Kraus. The collection consists primarily of texts of Italian operas but also includes Italian cantatas, serenatas, oratorios, dialogues and Passions. The collection, which dates from the 17th through the 20th century, documents musical performances by Italian, French, German and Austrian composers performed in numerous Italian cities and elsewhere. Learn more about the collection.

While vacationing in Rome in 1907, composer Sergei Rachmaninoff received an anonymous letter from a cello student whom he had never met. An admirer of Rachmaninoff and of Edgar Allan Poe, the student urged Rachmaninoff to set Poe’s poem, “The Bells,” to music. Rachmaninoff read a Russian translation of “The Bells” and was won over. He completed his choral symphony (“The Bells”) in 1913 and later deemed it his personal favorite of all his compositions.

Rachmaninoff based his composition on a Russian translation of “The Bells” by Konstantin Balmont, which took several liberties with Poe’s poem. Most notable is Balmont’s additions to the “Silver Bells” stanza, in which he adds a meditation on death as a “universal slumber—deep and sweet beyond…

Occupying almost 5,000 document cases, the archive of film producer David O. Selznick is the Ransom Center’s largest archive. Nathan Platte, a Musicology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, navigated through this enormous collection last year with a dissertation fellowship jointly sponsored by the Ransom Center and The University of Texas at Austin Office of Graduate Studies. Platte shares his experiences conducting research at the Ransom Center for his dissertation, “Musical Collaboration, Coercion, and Resistance in the Films of David O. Selznick, 1932–1948.”

While writing a dissertation on the films of David O. Selznick, I had the fortunate opportunity to conduct extensive research in the Harry Ransom Center’s gargantuan David O. Selznick collection. When one thinks of a film producer’s…

ADDENDUM: The Ransom Center is pleased to share new information about the manuscript of Mozart’s “A Musical Joke.” During a recent visit to the Ransom Center, Neal Zaslaw, Herbert Gussman Professor of Music at Cornell University, examined the manuscript and has since been able to shed light on its origins.

Professor Zaslaw has established that the copyist who wrote out the score was Christian Traugott Brunner, born in 1793. He has also determined that the Stadler for whom the copy was made was not Abbé Maximilian Stadler, but probably Albert Stadler, 1794–1888, and that the date in which the copy was made is much later than previously thought. Finally, Dr. Zaslaw concluded that the copy was made not from Mozart’s original…