Nicholas Roerich, Russian, 1874–1947. Hat and robe from the original production of "Le Sacre du printemps" ("The Rite of Spring"), 1913

It is 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and the audience is screaming, cat-calling, and fist-fighting. It’s the most famous riot in classical music history at the premiere of the ballet The Rite of Spring, composed by Igor Stravinsky, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, and premiered by the Ballets Russes.

Accustomed to more “palatable” ballets such as Swan Lake, the audience at the premiere of The Rite of Spring was shocked by the dissonant and jarring music, the violent and unnatural choreography, and the depiction of a Russian pagan tribe celebrating the arrival of spring by choosing a sacrificial virgin to dance herself to death. Upon…

Judith Freeman, a fellow from the University of Southern California, discusses her research in the Ross Russell archive. Freeman’s focus lies primarily with noir, Raymond Chandler, and Los Angeles, but her time in the collections expanded her interest in jazz.

Freeman’s project, “Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles,” was funded by the Erle Stanley Gardner Endowment for Mystery Studies.

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…

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Musician Graham Reynolds plays an interlude during the program “Censorship,” presented by the Harry Ransom Center in conjunction with the Dionysium. Photo by Pete Smith.

Visitors at the Dionysium event enjoy a night of lecture, debate, theatrical presentation, and music. Photo by Pete Smith.

Isaiah Sheffer of Selected Shorts reads selections from some notorious banned books. Photo by Pete Smith.

Sam Tanenhaus, Editor of The New York Times Book Review, spoke informally with Ransom Center staff about the future of publishing. Photo by Pete Smith.

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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…

Click on the four-way arrow in the bottom right-hand corner of the slideshow to convert into full-screen mode.

The Ransom Center has received a $10,000 grant from the Friends of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics to rehouse and rearrange its holdings of the Herschel family papers and to create an online finding aid.

The Herschel family papers, acquired in 1960 with subsequent smaller accessions of additional materials, largely represent the life and work of Sir John F. W. Herschel (1792-1871), the English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor. John Herschel has been called Britain’s first modern physical scientist, and his correspondence has been noted as one of the most valuable archives for 19th-century science.

The Herschel family papers at the Ransom Center form a significant resource for the study of the history of science in general and also for studies in several individual fields, such as astronomy, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. The lives of the Herschels, their pioneering achievements, their interactions with other leading scientists of their time and their influence on their colleagues’ work are topics scholars may pursue in the papers.

The Herschel family papers will be closed to scholars during the duration of the grant, which runs through Dec. 31, 2011.

A drawing of Halley's Comet by Sir John F. W. Herschel in 1835–1836.

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,…

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…

It is 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and the audience is screaming, cat-calling, and fist-fighting. It’s the most famous riot in classical music history at the premiere of the ballet The Rite of Spring, composed by Igor Stravinsky, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, and premiered by the Ballets Russes.

Accustomed to more “palatable” ballets such as Swan Lake, the audience at the premiere of The Rite of Spring was shocked by the dissonant and jarring music, the violent and unnatural choreography, and the depiction of a Russian pagan tribe celebrating the arrival of spring by choosing a sacrificial virgin to dance herself to death. Upon hearing the opening bassoon solo played in an unrecognizably high register, French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saens is…

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…