The Harry Ransom Center is an internationally renowned humanities research center. Music materials can be found across the collections of the Ransom Center. In addition to manuscript and printed scores, libretti, and books on music theory, history, and notation, the collections contain musicians' correspondence, photographs, artwork, recordings, clippings, programs, and costume and set designs, dating from the 11th-century to the present.
The Briscoe Center for American History is one of the nation’s leading research centers for historical study. Since 1980, the center has built extensive research collections of folk and popular music from Texas and the greater South and Southwest in an effort to document the development of not only different musical styles but also the music industry itself. Significant collections include the Willie Nelson Collection; the Study of the American Spiritual; 19th century sheet music in the Natchez Trace Collection; the folk and country music collection of Townsend Miller; business and talent files for Austin venues such as the Armadillo World HEadquarters and Soap Creek Saloon; material on Navasota songster and guitarist Mance Lipscomb; commerical recordings from the 1920s to the present in the Texas Music Collection; and the archives of Kerrville Festival founder Rod Kennedy.
The UT Libraries holds a number of archival and special collections related to music. For information regarding access and additional collections not listed below, contact Molly Roy.
The Historical Music Recordings Collection contains over 200,000 items on nearly all formats, including LPs, 45s, 78s, lacquer discs, broadcast transcription discs, audio cassettes, piano rolls, and open reel tape. See the research guide for further information.
The collection contains twenty works by violinist, composer, and professor Howard Boatwright, including both sacred and secular works for a variety of instrumental and vocal settings.
The collection includes a number of books and scores belonging to Dr. Walter Ducloux (1913-1997), Centennial Professor Emeritus of Opera at The University of Texas, as well as reel-to-reel tapes of historical recordings of operatic and orchestral works dated from 1949 to 1983.
The collection contains several publications, manuscripts, recordings, and correspondence by Dr. Gerre Hancock, Butler School of Music faculty member from 2004-12. Hancock was considered the finest organ improviser in America.
The collection, digitized and made available in Texas Scholarworks, comprises 25 letters and postcards, and 9 photographs. Correspondents are Milton Babbitt, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Howard Hanson, Ulysses Kay, Otto Luening, Vincent Persichetti, Jaromir Podesva, William Schuman, and Clark Terry. Karl Korte was a teacher of composition at the University of Texas at Austin from 1971 to 1996 and co-director of the electronic music studio from 1984.
The Ethnomusicology Archives contain about 1,000 field recordings of music from all ice-free continents. Latin American and South Asian musics are particularly strongly represented. Housed in Music Building East (MBH), the Archives include a transcription laboratory.
For further information and access, contact Andrew Dell'Antonio, Head of the Musicology/Ethnomusicology Division, Butler School of Music.
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