Upcoming events
IAML Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa, 23-28 June 2024. Details here
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.
Upcoming events
IAML Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa, 23-28 June 2024. Details here
Search RISM’s abbreviations for libraries, archives and collections with historical music holdings
Librarians, see here what RISM has to offer you
All about Muscat, RISM’s specialized program for cataloging musical sources
The Performance Material for Richard Wagner's “Tristan and Isolde” in Dresden
Tonight, the Bayreuth Festival opens with Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. A good opportunity to take a brief look at the sources of this work described in RISM. The composer prepared his first sketches as early as 1857, and an autograph album leaf, written in Paris in 1860, can now...
‘The Seven Last Words of Christ’ by Haydn and Barbieri
An ambitious digitization project targeting the musical heritage collections of the National Library of Spain has provided access to 31,000 musical sources that were long accessible only in the reading room, thereby inspiring both musicians and scholars to new discoveries. In the following we reprint from the library’s blog –...
What an anniversary year is good for
The following text by Eberhard von Oppen originally appeared on the Carus-Blog and is reproduced here with the publisher’s kind permission. The tendency to focus on “round” time intervals according to the globally dominant decimal system and celebrate the respective anniversaries is as widespread as it is justifiable, since the...
A Musical Guide to the European Football Championship
On 14 June the European Football Championship 2024 started in Germany. 24 national teams had qualified for it; in the meantime two thirds of them have been eliminated. Now we look forward to the quarter- and semifinals, culminating in the final on Sunday, 14 July 2024. In the two-day break...
New RISM Sigla for South African Institutions
The IAML Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa, is underway. In anticipation of the congress, we have used the Directory of South African Music Collections by Santie de Jongh to update our sigla for South Africa. As part of our work to document musical sources worldwide, RISM assigns an abbreviation, called...
Upcoming events
IAML Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa, 23-28 June 2024. Details here
Search RISM’s abbreviations for libraries, archives and collections with historical music holdings
Librarians, see here what RISM has to offer you
All about Muscat, RISM’s specialized program for cataloging musical sources