The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) - International Inventory of Musical Sources - is an international, non-profit organization that aims to comprehensively document extant musical sources worldwide: manuscripts, printed music editions, writings on music theory, and libretti that are found in libraries, archives, churches, schools, and private collections. RISM’s over 1.5 million records can be searched at no cost through the RISM Catalog and RISM Online. RISM was founded in Paris in 1952 and is the largest and only global organization that documents written musical sources. RISM records what exists and where it can be found.
Search in RISM
Search in RISM
Library Sigla
Search RISM’s abbreviations for libraries, archives and collections with historical music holdings
RISM for Libraries
Librarians, see here what RISM has to offer you
Muscat
All about Muscat, RISM’s specialized program for cataloging musical sources
News
Samuel Wesley’s Fugue for Mendelssohn
The following is by Dominic Newman and originally appeared on the British Library’s Music blog (© British Library Board, Creative Commons Attribution Licence). Just before the end of his life, Samuel Wesley – the elder composer, 1766–1837, the middle of the three main Samuels in the Wesley dynasty – experienced...
Vicente Lusitano in RISM
An article last year in Early Music America entitled “Vicente Lusitano – A Legacy Recovered” by Garrett Schumann reminded us of how important it is to ensure that musical sources of underrepresented composers are more visible in the digital environment. Vicente Lusitano (ca. 1522-after 1561) was a Portuguese composer and...
Early sources of J.S. Bach's English Suites united in Leipzig
The following originally appeared on the Bach Archiv Leipzig, Germany. It is published here with kind permission. New collectibles from our treasury Early sources of J.S. Bach’s English Suites united in Leipzig The »English Suites« – one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s most famous collections of works for keyboard instruments –...
News from the Czech RISM Working Group
In the field of musicology and music documentation, the most important contributions of the Music Department of the National Library of the Czech Republic involve the cataloging of musical sources in the RISM database. Most of this work forms part of a project supported by the Ministry of Culture of...
Annual Report 2023
Crowning the intensive development of several years, by late 2023 the RISM database hit a new benchmark of 1.5 million source records, freely searchable through both the classic RISM Catalog and the recently developed RISM Online interface. This impressive increase in part results from the ongoing cataloging activity of our...
Library Sigla
Search RISM’s abbreviations for libraries, archives and collections with historical music holdings
RISM for Libraries
Librarians, see here what RISM has to offer you
Muscat
All about Muscat, RISM’s specialized program for cataloging musical sources