The Repertoire International des Sources Musicales, or RISM as it is known by those in music, is a musicological project to locate, describe, and catalog all known manuscripts containing music. This particular volume of the project, Series A/II, deals with music manuscripts after 1600. It is the fifth cumulative edition, following two microfiche editions (1983, 1986), and two CD editions (1995, 1996). Starting with this edition, all assigned RISM numbers will be fixed, so that future researchers will not have to locate different RISM numbers for one manuscript. This edition has added Italian and Spanish language instructions for the first time, so that there are now five languages represented with instructions in the 197 page search manual (English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish).
The fifth edition of RISM contains 50,000 entries, summing up 250,000 works by approximately 10,000 composers from 469 libraries. There are five instruction cards included, in each of the languages represented in the search manual. These single page cards provide a printed example of the search screen, and the twelve indices available for the user to access and search by. These indices are: Composer, Filing title, Thematic catalogue, Key, Scoring, Name (owner, author, etc.), Date of manuscript, Music incipit, Role, Provenances, Library, and Keyword. Each of these indices appears on the left side of the screen as a line icon that can be expanded to fill the entire screen. There are three search strategies that the instruction manual recommends: 1) by composer and composition type, 2) by manuscript date and library name, and 3) by music incipit. Obviously, the user can search by any one of the criteria in the twelve indices and find the information desired. The single page instruction cards provide a full screen example of what is displayed when a search finds the desired information. This information includes (in order of presentation): Composer, cross‐references to other composers, filing title, thematic catalogue ‐ key, title, date, collation, format and watermarks, number of incipit (scoring, tempi, key), scoring with code numbers, old shelf mark, comments, cross‐references to literature (hyperlinked), library sigla ‐ shelf mark, and RISM number.
As a musicologist, I can vouch for the fact that RISM has always been a key research tool for all musicologists. The CD editions make the job of searching and finding music manuscripts as easy as sitting down at any library’s computer catalog. This new edition is as thorough and complete as all the previous editions, providing access to more manuscripts as well as new manuscript discoveries since the last edition. The fact that the instruction manual is written in five languages attests to the popularity and necessity of this product in every music library and music school in the world. I highly recommend this product to those libraries and schools, even though they already know the importance of this research tool.
