Bases of RILM’s international committees and partnerships.
RILM also works with UNESCO as an accredited non-governmental organization and civil society partner dedicated to preserving and safeguarding the world’s musical heritage. In addition, colleges and universities worldwide subscribe to RILM’s resources. Although North American and European institutions constitute the majority of its subscribers, RILM also has a significant presence in countries such as Japan, South Africa, and China. Japan, for example, has developed its own digital database for collecting and publishing information on academic literature related to music in the country.
RILM’s interconnected framework effectively reduces regional and linguistic barriers in music research, facilitating global access to vital musical knowledge. By integrating localized expertise with a comprehensive digital infrastructure, RILM connects international societies, specialized archives, and national committees, enabling researchers to easily explore a wide range of musical genres–from 14th century European polyphony to Punjabi folk music and contemporary hip hop.
RILM’s Commission Internationale Mixte plays a crucial role in directing global musicology by influencing how researchers engage with music literature. Established in 1968 under Barry S. Brook, RILM’s founder, the committee ensures that RILM’s digital collections and bibliographies reflect a comprehensive representation of global music scholarship across various languages, subdisciplines, and cultural contexts. Acting as the primary governing and advisory board, the Commission functions as an international steering committee, overseeing that digital tools and bibliographies accurately encapsulate the diverse landscape of music research. It serves as a crucial link between RILM’s overarching mission and its daily operations at the International Center, thereby enhancing the relevance and effectiveness of music scholarship worldwide.
The Commission Mixte does more than provide administrative oversight; its decisions directly impact how scholars locate music literature. By merging historical musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music, and library science, the board safeguards diversity so that no genre, geographic region, or culture is overlooked. They guide how RILM adapts to shifting digital publishing standards, which simplifies how students and professors uncover niche articles, dissertations, and conference proceedings. Furthermore, they facilitate connections with a massive network of national committees worldwide, ensuring that data pipelines remain active across geopolitical borders. This collaborative framework provides modern music scholarship with an essential interconnected digital map that supports daily research and exploration.
RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document our history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.
In this installment, Executive Director Tina Frühauf ruminates on the place of music reference at a time when Wikipedia was changing how information was being generated, shared, and networked. Now 25 years after the platform’s release, the piece remains relevant, as the possibilities and potential dangers surrounding digital access points to knowledge, musical and otherwise, continue to surface in the context of generative AI and large language models (LLMs).
Why music reference still matters in the age of Wikipedia
The field of music reference has evolved continuously since the 1768 publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique. But the advent of Wikipedia in 2001 has had a dramatic impact on this hitherto gradual evolutionary process in terms of format, authorship, and editorial structures. Assessments of Wikipedia’s impact differ widely, from the view of Wikipedia as a means and medium of internationality to complaints about Wikipedia’s elimination of the individual and avoidance of editorial control mechanisms. Whether Wikipedia strikes you as a net benefit or loss, it has triggered important questions as to how future reference works and bibliographies can and should be made accessible, to whom, and with what features. Technology has changed how much can be accomplished and how far one can reach. But where does all this leave musicologists and music librarians? Printed reference works are organisms in themselves, reflective of their time and culture, region and subject matter. Technology has the ability to transform each organism into a universe of musical reference works and bibliographies, easily accessible in multiple languages and across cultural and other divides. More concretely, technology can create such a universe by facilitating cross-database searching, hyperlinking, and complex keyword searches, while maintaining the identity and specificity of reference works as individual organisms. Indeed, why, in the age of advanced information technology, should one reference work exist without the other? Such a communal approach was first put forth by Wikipedia, but neither thought through nor further developed beyond the issues of open access and open authorship. Ideally, digital archives should not aim toward completeness and a global perspective, but toward carefully curated content by means of 21st-century technology.
With technological advances, currency becomes an important matter as well. But as music researchers continue to rely on established and existing reference sources and bibliographies for research on individuals and subjects not included in modern encyclopedias, and for historiographical work which compares the representation of individuals and subjects over time, “old” encyclopedias have now received the ability to become new encyclopedias for the digital age.
In the longue durée, music reference works have always been reflective of their time and location, and also of their editors and users. The aforementioned Rousseau Dictionnaire is a case in point, as it has been deemed both radical and traditional at the same time—radical, as Rousseau advanced philosophy on opera and revealed his rejection of French musical tradition; traditional, as he held on to existing categories—music as art and music as science—and views on music theory accepted in the 18th century. This presence of two (or more) distinct strands or “voices” can be best understood as a reflection of the dialogue process in the formation of musical ideas.
RILM supports such dialogue by comprehensively and accurately representing music scholarship in all countries and languages, and across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries. If you think your faculty and students could benefit from the kind of resources RILM provides, I invite you visit our website to learn more.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1775), one of the many historic reference works available in RILM Music Encyclopedias.
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RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document our history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.
Much has happened in the three years since this was published. Originally intended to explore why a well-crafted abstract remains essential to discovery, its advice has aged well: in an era when AI can generate a convincing academic abstract in seconds, precision, specificity, and accuracy matter more than ever, not only for human researchers, but also for the AI systems increasingly helping them find and understand scholarship.
The power of abstracts in music research
The sources available for musicological research accumulate at an accelerated pace. And as they do, the ability to quickly identify and select what is most pertinent for a research project becomes paramount. Fortunately, there is a simple and robust tool that is particularly adept at isolating what is useful to researchers within this modern environment crowded with digital noise, a tool that makes a seemingly daunting process more manageable.
Enter the mighty abstract: the (often underappreciated) protagonist in music research that instantly, indefatigably, and incessantly shuttles musical ideas across vast regions to research communities worldwide. It is hard to overstate the value of a well-crafted abstract. Even the most compelling and well-publicized scholarship will likely fail to reach a broad audience without a concise conveyal of its most important ideas. Academic research is typically the result of a substantial investment in time, energy, and a multitude of resources. However, without reducing or sidelining in any way the importance of the project itself, be it a publication or a lecture, in reality, more people will read the abstract, as an initial point of entry, than experience the finished product.
Abstracts do a great deal of heavy lifting, particularly in the initial stages of a research project. As most music scholars know all too well, a captivating abstract can inspire and pique readers’ interests, resulting in presentations being chosen for conferences, book proposals being accepted by publishers, articles being selected for inclusion in periodicals, and program notes getting offered space to elucidate a performance. Despite its brevity, rather in great measure because of it, a well-constructed abstract is perhaps more effective than any other form of writing to express and share its author’s most innovative ideas.
Additionally, the benefits of becoming fluent with the techniques and rules for writing an effective abstract extend well beyond individual interest, achievement, or professional development. This skill brings value to the sphere of social good, equity, inclusion, and equality. When crafted well, an abstract’s valuable ideas stand a much better chance of becoming widely circulated, benefitting an extensive, truly global community of music researchers. In a global context where access to writings on music varies considerably across geographic regions, abstracts transcend such restrictions, traveling lighter to make the free-flowing exchange of ideas more equitable. Abstracts open doors and break barriers, and as one of the most powerful means available to communicate key concepts succinctly, their role in the research and publication process is essential and wide-reaching.
With this in mind, the following guidelines and examples, taken from Chapter 15 of the third edition of How to Write About Music: The RILM Manual of Style (2023), provides best practices, helpful approaches, clear examples, and missteps to avoid when writing an abstract, from the perspective of an organization that has consistently aimed to represent all the world’s music equally and equitably. From the staff working at the International Center in New York City to committee members located around the world, RILM’s collaborative, global network remains more committed than ever to the dissemination of music scholarship from every country. Since RILM’s focus is on music, the guidelines below are specifically suited for scholarship on this subject and related fields. However, it should be emphasized that, just as RILM has followed the discipline of musicology in becoming more and more interdisciplinary, many of the preferred conventions below will be appropriate (and even preferable) for other fields in the arts and humanities as well.
For more information and purchase options for the e-book How to Write About Music: The RILM Manual of Style, Third Edition, as well as to learn about our forthcoming fourth edition, head to https://www.rilm.org/publications/publication-RilmManual/.
An abstract ought to convey every important aspect of the writing it describes. Nonessential matters should be omitted so as not to mislead the reader.
Do not spend too much time describing the item’s intellectual background; it is more important to deal with its content. If you are presenting new findings, concentrate on them and do not rehearse the known facts. State clearly the main conclusion or conclusions given in the item being abstracted (although not all research yields specific conclusions). Providing concrete information such as personal names, places, and names of organizations is always a desideratum as long as the item gives substantial information about them. If you are referring to a manuscript, give its present location (institution and complete shelf number). If you are referring to specific musical or scholarly works, give their full titles. If you are referring to one or more elements of a work, indicate where they are found in the longer work. Indicate the time period under discussion as precisely as possible. If you use unusual terms, define them. If you are dealing with pedagogy, indicate the level of education concerned.
Style
Avoid colloquial or informal language and write in complete sentences. Do not include personal views on the value of the item being abstracted. Many effective abstracts resemble a single well-shaped paragraph, with topic sentence, development, and conclusion. Writing in the voice of the author (declaratively) yields a more vivid abstract than does describing the author’s work and lends itself to specificity.
Checklist for abstractors
All abstracts should supply the following:
First names of all authors, translators, collaborators, and subjects, except for very well-known persons.
Complete titles of musical works in the original language, with index or opus numbers in their correct form. (Give original-language titles for works only when the work has a given title, however; see 10.2: Generic titles.)
Complete names of all associations, societies, performing groups, religious bodies, and academic and government institutions in the language of their country.
For manuscripts, location and shelf number, with RISM siglum for the library.
Definitions of terms not in standard music reference works.
Complete and correct place names in their appropriate historical form. Add current forms in parentheses when referring to an earlier time, e.g., Pressburg (now Bratislava).
Basic bibliographic information (place and date of publication) for publications referred to.
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The four R projects emerged from the efforts of scholars, archivists, librarians, and musicians to create research tools that provide access to key sources of musical heritage and culture. These sources include musical works preserved in manuscripts and printed editions, historical and contemporary writings on music, and visual representations of music and musical performance. Recognizing that a vast body of music-related literature and iconography remained largely unexplored, the International Musicological Society (IMS) and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML) jointly sponsored the development of the R-projects. The purpose was to create bibliographic research tools that identify, document, and facilitate access to this extensive collection of primary sources.
Below are short descriptions of the four R projects:
The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM), or International Inventory of Musical Sources, is dedicated to identifying, documenting, and providing access to musical sources worldwide. Through a network of independent national working groups, RISM catalogs printed music published before 1800, music manuscripts dating from after 1600, as well as libretti, theoretical treatises, and other music-related documents. These records are consolidated and standardized by the RISM Zentralredaktion (Central Editorial Office) in Germany, before being prepared for publication.
The Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM), or International Inventory of Musical Iconography, based in Switzerland, is dedicated to documenting and studying visual materials related to music, dance, theatre, and opera. To support research in musical iconography, RIdIM publishes catalogues, scholarly studies, and a newsletter and sponsors the annual scholarly yearbook Imago musicae, published in collaboration with Libreria Musicale Italiana.
The most recent of the four R-projects is the Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale (RIPM), or Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1800–1950). Established in 1980, RIPM was created to provide comprehensive access to historical music periodicals and to promote research based on this rich but often overlooked body of documentary evidence. By indexing and making available music-related journals and newspapers, RIPM has become an essential resource for scholars investigating the musical, cultural, and intellectual history of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) publishes a range of digital resources that support the global music research community. Its flagship publication, RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, is a comprehensive bibliography of scholarly and professional writings on music. Other resources, such as the RILM Index to Scores and Collected Editions (RISE), provide digital tools for locating specific musical works within collected editions, anthologies, and series. RILM also offers specialized reference and archival resources. The RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines (RAPMM) is an extensive and continually expanding digital collection of independently published popular music magazines and fanzines, spanning the late 1960s to the present. RILM Music Encyclopedias brings together a growing collection of full-text music reference works, while DEUMM Online provides access to the most comprehensive modern music dictionary in the Italian language. In addition, RILM hosts MGG Online on its platform, offering authoritative and up-to-date information on a wide range of music-related topics, including musicians, genres, historical periods, and scholarly concepts. RILM also now owns the Hofmeister XIX database.
RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document our history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.
For this installment in the series, we return to a post that caused quite a stir amongst the Bibliolore faithful when published here in 2017. In it, former RILM editor Jim Cowdery highlights a few tongue-in-cheek moments when musicologists, lexicographers, and even our staff injected some levity into their work. See if you can find them all, and check out Bibliolore’s recent post, Unique records in RILM Abstracts, which serves as a great companion piece.
The pointy end: Spoof articles
Many reference works for music—and presumably other topics—contain articles about fictitious characters. Sometimes writers for these works slyly slip them by their editors (an article on “Verdi, Lasagne” was almost typeset for printing in The new Grove dictionary); others are incorporated with the collusion of all parties.
RILM is not above adding a spoof article or two to RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. Of course, we won’t tell you which ones they are, but we’ll give you a hint: One includes a reference to the very real and wonderful Malcolm Bilson, who favors us with a Mozart concerto below.
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The Hofmeister XIX database provides searchable access to more than 330,000 bibliographic records from the Hofmeister Monatsberichte, published between 1829 and 1900. As a major primary source for the study of 19th century music publishing, repertoire, and musical taste, the database includes records of music scores, music-related books, periodicals, portraits, and other ephemera, with a primary focus on Germany and Austria. A digital version of Friedrich Hofmeister’sMusikalisch-literarischer Monatsbericht, the database allows users to search by composer, title, publisher, and year. This enables researchers to trace publication histories and examine trends in 19th century musical repertoire and publishing practices.
The Hofmeister XIX database was developed by Royal Holloway, University of London and King’s College London Department of Digital Humanities under the leadership of musicologists Nicholas Cook and Liz Robinson, with support from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Since 2007, the project has provided open-access resources for music librarians, scholars, and researchers worldwide. Ownership of the database has since been transferred to RILM, which is committed to maintaining its long-term accessibility, preserving the database’s scholarly integrity, and continuing to recognize the contributions of the founding institutions while upholding the high standards associated with Hofmeister XIX.
RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document our history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.
The series continues with another short piece by retired RILM editor Jim Cowdery. It relays a little-known (and perhaps surprising) meeting between two very different individuals who shared an interest in music’s ability to evoke powerful emotional responses.
Thakur and Mussolini
Near the end of his visit to Rome in 1933, the Hindustānī vocalist Omkarnath Thakur (1887–1968) received an invitation to dine with Mussolini; Il Duce had caught wind of Thakur’s theories and experiments regarding the inducement of emotional states by rāga performances, and he wanted a demonstration.
After a specially prepared vegetarian dinner, Thakur began with hindolam, which depicts valor. “When I was soaring in the high notes of the rāga,” he later recalled, “Mussolini suddenly said ‘Stop!’ I opened my eyes and found that he was sweating heavily. His face was pink and his eyes looked like burning coals. A few minutes later his visage gained normalcy and he said ‘A good experiment.’”
After Thakur brought him to tears with rāga chayanat, which is meant to depict pathos, Mussolini said, after taking some time to recover, “Very valuable and enlightening demonstration about the power of Indian music.”
Il Duce then returned the favor: Producing his violin, he treated Thakur to works by Paganini and Mozart. Again, both agreed on the music’s power to evoke emotion.
“I could not sleep at all the entire night,” the vocalist recalled, “wondering whether the meeting had really taken place; I thought it was a part of a dream.” The next day, two letters from Mussolini arrived—one thanking him and one appointing him as director of a newly formed university department to study the effect of music on the mind (an appointment that he was unable to accept).
This according to “Omkarnath Thakur & Benito Mussolini” by B.K.V. Sastry (Sruti 163 [April 1998] pp. 19–21; RILM Abstracts 1999-26342).
Although the exact date of this meeting is not recorded, we know that it took place in May 1933—80 years ago this month! Below, Thakur performs rāga bhairavi.
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RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document our history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.
Next up is a piece written by editor Jason Lee Oakes that shows how RILM curates a music research experience that is itself quite musical. Focusing on popular music as an example, Oakes notes the importance of relationships (musical and otherwise), the process of finding valuable information (while filtering out what is not needed), and the delicate balance between novelty and familiarity that researchers receive in RILM’s search results.
Mastering the mix: Choosing authentic popular music material for libraries
Long before huge databases of music recordings could be shared and filtered with such efficiency, academic databases like RILM Abstracts of Music Literature developed a similar approach to information about music. Drawing on a “peer-to-peer” network of shared music research, today there are nearly a million records about music in RILM Abstracts of Literature, searchable through the EBSCO interface. But how can searches of this massive database be made as “musical” as possible, quite apart from the content itself? Taking a page from Napster and from other digital music algorithms, how can we best enhance the quality and the impact of information retrieval in academic databases through increased musicality?
A good starting point can be established through a simple observation: Music is defined by relationships. A single note doesn’t mean much in isolation. Even Tuvan and Mongolian throat singers subtly alter timbres/overtones over time to make a “single note” musical. In the broadest possible sense, then, music acquires meaning through how notes are arranged relative to other notes: arranged pitch-wise in relative intervals to form melodies and harmonies; arranged relative to time through structured rhythms, metrical systems, and other temporal modes; and through the relative arrangement of voices and instruments to create compelling timbres and textures. Musical meaning is also found in how humanly organized sounds are used to organize people—acting as a powerful symbol for cultural identity, social belonging, individual uniqueness, and other methods of negotiating human relationships.
Moving from music itself to music scholarship, database search results are usually at their most effective and appealing when a query is posed in relational terms. Taking an inverse example at first, if you search RILM Abstracts for records on “popular music” with Major Topics chosen from EBSCO’s pull-down search menu, more than 82,000 records are returned. The search result isn’t likely to be “effective or appealing” to anyone due to its single-note quality and the lack of focus that results.
But now let’s try turning this into a multi-parameter search. One quick, easy and useful parameter that can be added to the mix is “Full Text”. By clicking the Linked Full Text box on the left side of the screen, only records with attached PDFs are returned, saving the user a trip to the library in the process. At the time of writing, this search returns more than 7,000 entries. It’s still a large number, but a lot less than 82,000 and the content is just a click away.
From here it’s easy to take more steps to get a more “musical” search result by throwing more parameters, and thus a broader array of relationships, into the mix. Adding an EBSCO Subject parameter to the parameters already chosen, the search is narrowed to records where the chosen word or phrase appears in RILM Abstract’s indexing for a given record. For instance, choosing “heavy metal” as the subject returns around 100 full-text citations, a much more manageable number than 7,000.
Most important of all, the results are musical. They strike a useful balance between uniformity and diversity, a balance likewise found in music that strikes an aesthetically appealing balance between repetition and variation. While all the records in the dataset are uniform in addressing heavy metal directly and thoroughly, there’s a good bit of variation otherwise: spanning writings that examine “metal studies” as an academic field, sonic traits of drone metal in light of genre theory, the sociology of Caribbean heavy metal scenes, and perceptions of sexuality and gender around female metal fans, among many other topics.
From EBSCO to Excite, the ultimate goal of most search engines is to return a good mix of results. This helps explain the shift from the directory model of first-wave search engines like Yahoo Directory to the second wave of webcrawler search engines (Google most famously) that utilized algorithms to locate sites, collect metadata and build an index. I would submit that the latter won public favor due to two main factors: it was more likely to deliver exactly the results the user was looking for (indexes are more granular than top-down categories); and it was more likely to return unexpected results.
Needless to say, random and irrelevant results are not widely desired. They are equivalent to “wrong notes” in a melody and just about as popular. Instead, results that provide a novel yet purposeful perspective on a query are often the most impactful—like the surprising yet logical-after-the-fact twist in a melody that serves as the “hook”. Returning to the example of Napster, it hooked users not just because it found the music they already knew they wanted, but also because they ended up discovering new and unfamiliar music they went on to fall in love with—often by searching laterally through a given user’s music collection. This mix of the familiar and the novel is a sure-fire formula for a successful search interface.
With this in mind, the digital-age database manager must work to be a master of the mix—all the more so when it comes to popular music studies and other interdisciplinary fields. The popular music researcher is sure to need materials published in non-music journals and publications. What’s more, she is likely to seek out other important data strewn across magazines and fanzines, posted on blogs and other websites, and located across a range of other non-traditional sources. To accommodate their needs, RILM has been seeking out and compiling more of these “outside the box” materials, curated for potential use value as primary or secondary data.
Given the risk of information overload that comes with the widening and the blurring of traditional boundaries, effective curation becomes all the more important. Approaching a database from a musical point of view offers a step in the right direction. Editors at RILM and at other databases are increasingly placed in the role of “record collectors” who don’t just “collect” but who also filter, organize, and interpret the data we collect. Like the crate-digging DJ, we dedicate ourselves to digging for data and creatively integrating new materials. This DJ mindset also highlights the necessity of working across various old and new media and of delving into unexplored spaces to find hidden gems.
The Alash Ensemble sings “Ediski deg boostaamny” (My throat, the cuckoo), an old Tuvan tune re-worked by the group that compares the singer’s voice to birds. It exemplifies the manifold sonic and interpersonal relationships on which musicality depends.
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RILM Index to Scores and Collected Editions (RISE) is a comprehensive digital finding aid that helps users locate musical works published within collections, sets, and series. It indexes individual pieces found in complete editions of composers’ works, music anthologies, born‑digital editions, and scholarly collections. Each record provides detailed descriptions–performing forces and instrumentation, language, genre, score type, sources, and publication information. With more than 590,000 entries, RISE expands as new materials enter the market.
RISE–originally known as the Index to Printed Music–began in 1985 with an NEH grant secured by George R. Hill to create a finding aid for musical scores in scholarly editions. Over the years, it expanded into a comprehensive database, incorporating the full contents of Collected Editions, Historical Series & Sets & Monuments of Music: A Bibliography by Hill and Norris L. Stephens (1997), itself grounded in Anna H. Heyer’s Historical Sets, Collected Editions, and Monuments of Music (1957–1980). Further development continued under the James Adrian Music Company, founded by Hill in 2000. Hill oversaw the project’s growth until 2018, when RILM assumed ownership and editorial stewardship, ensuring the database’s continued expansion, accessibility, and long‑term sustainability.
Today, RISE includes digital editions as well as scores beyond the Western classical canon. It contains more than 10,000 records with direct links to open‑access editions, many of them born‑digital. Reflecting RILM’s global mission, RISE indexes publications from 58 countries and vocal music in over 100 languages. Beyond its core search functions, it offers multiple discovery tools: preferred title links gather all editions of a work, a full‑text limiter highlights records with open‑access editions, and instrumentation searching allows users to locate pieces written for a wide range of ensemble combinations. Links between related record types support seamless navigation from the most detailed information about individual works to broader data on entire series or collections.
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