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.
