RILM Music Encyclopedias is a collection of dozens of music reference works from 1775 to the present, made available as an electronic resource by Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale. The collection expands every year by three to five titles.

Scope and Contents

RILM Music Encyclopedias (RME) was launched in December 2015 with 41 titles.^[1][2] In line with RILM's mission to represent the world's writings of music, these stem from different countries, and also from different periods: The earliest, Jean Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique, was published in 1775. There is also the first edition of “The Grove”, in an edition published by Theodore Presser in 1895.^[3] The largest amount of titles date from 2000 onward.^[4] Among them are Ken Bloom's Broadway, Lol Henderson and Lee Stacey's Encyclopedia of Music in the 20th Century, Peter Matzke et al., Das Gothic- und Dark Wave-Lexikon, and Richard Kostelanetz's Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes.^[5] The comprehensive Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, conceived between 1972 bis 2006, is also included.^[6] RILM Music Encyclopedias holds important titles for ethnomusicologists, among them The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music and Eileen Southern's Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians, which is the first single comprehensive volume of its kind.^[7] The collection expands annually with additions of four titles in average.^[8] One of the titles, Komponisten der Gegenwart (KDG), is being regularly updated with new articles or additions to existing articles.^[9][10] Stephen Henry mentions RME's “ability to provide access to some excellent European resources that might not otherwise be available to libraries with less than comprehensive collections