A UNESCO-accredited organization, Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale is your portal to a world of writings on all musical traditions. 

By reaching across borders, RILM provides a carefully curated, fully searchable collection of resources designed to advance music research in the 21st century. 

In addition to sophisticated search engines driven by advanced algorithms, RILM draws on the real intelligence of its staff, hailing from widely divergent backgrounds, to ensure that you find the authoritative information that brings your ideas to life. 

As digital technologies rapidly advance, voices in music research can travel farther and faster than ever before. A fuller understanding of global musical knowledge, and its role in carrying each nation’s cultural heritage, is now in reach. 

But what does it mean to go beyond music research that tends to circulate around scholarship produced in only some locations, by some publishers, in some languages, devoted to some performance practices?

What if so many of the important voices that convey musical knowledge are simply never heard?

RILM began with a goal – radical when first proposed in Professor Barry S. Brook’s bibliography class at Queens College in 1964 – to create a fully abstracted and indexed international bibliography of musicological literature. After painstakingly logging paper submissions received from around the world into a digital database, the first print edition would be completed three years later, inaugurating what is today RILM’s flagship product: RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. Now just one node in RILM’s network of music research resources, RILM Abstracts remains the cornerstone of RILM’s global mission of dignity, equality, and mutual respect for all musicological literature. 

Relying also on the contributions of committee members active in several dozen countries, it epitomizes UNESCO’s spirit of international collaboration, simultaneously preserving cultural heritage digitally and providing tools for music education in the broadest sense.

In addition to abstracts and indexing, RILM encompasses hundreds of full-text journals covering scholarship in over 150 countries, digitized encyclopedias going back 250 years, rare fanzine collections, printed music discovery, and original publications. 

RILM’s databases and resources have the power to stimulate music scholarship across all disciplinary and linguistic boundaries in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences, bringing you more of the “eureka” moments that solidify, redirect, and focus your research. 

RILM is for…

Librarians. 

Teachers. 

Writers. 

Musicians. 

Students. 

Composers.

RILM is for a global research community just like ours.