Professor James Grier, of the Don Wright Faculty of Music at The University of Western Ontario, was awarded a Killam Research Fellowship for Musicology.
Nine outstanding Canadian researchers were awarded a total of $1.26 million in the 42nd annual competition administered by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Grier is the first Killam honoree from the Don Wright Faculty of Music and the 12th from Western since the program started in 1968. Grier’s research project is the Foundations of Musical Literacy in the Medieval West 800 – 1100: Oral and Written Transmission in Early Plainsong.
The same research project was also awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
“Gregorian chant, or plainsong, was the liturgical chant of the medieval church, sung throughout Western Europe in one form or another, from at least the 18th century until its suppression by the Second Vatican Council in 1964,” says Grier. “This project will investigate the origins of plainsong, and the means by which it was disseminated in Western Europe during the Central Middle Ages.
“Plainsong was among the first medieval musical repertories to be recorded in writing, and historians have come to regard the use of visual materials for the preservation of information as one of the distinguishing characteristics of Western culture in general. I shall reconstruct the scribal procedures by which they were created, show how musical notation was used to preserve and transmit plainsong, and enrich our understanding of the musical practices that lie behind them.”
The project continues research Grier has undertaken with the support of SSSHRC (1989, 1998, 2002 and 2006), a Morse Fellowship at Yale (1993-94) and as the Edward T. Cone Member in Music Studies at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2002-03). The research has been published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Early Music History, Scriptorium and Plainsong and Medieval Music, and his own book, The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adémar de Chabannes in Eleventh-Century Aquitaine (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Killam Research Fellowships, with a value of $70,000 a year, enable Canada’s best scientists and scholars to devote two years to full-time research. The fellowships are awarded to the individual recipients, but the funds are paid to and administered by universities or research institutes. The recipients are chosen by the Killam Selection Committee, which comprises 15 eminent scientists and scholars representing a broad range of disciplines.
Among Canada’s most distinguished research awards, the Canada Council for the Arts Killam Research Fellowships are made possible by a bequest of Mrs. Dorothy J. Killam and a gift she made before her death in 1965. The awards support scholars engaged in research projects of outstanding merit in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, health sciences, engineering and interdisciplinary studies within these fields. This year there were 79 applications.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $20 million in grant awards and offers to 197 successful applicants. NEH promotes excellence and lifelong learning in the humanities by offering competitive grant opportunities in scholarly research, education, the preservation of significant cultural collections, public programming and digital humanities.
ACLS offers fellowships and grants in more than a dozen programs for research in the humanities and related social sciences at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels.