Professor earns Killam

Print

By Communications Staff
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Professor James Grier of the Don Wright Faculty of Music has won three prestigious awards including a Killam Research Fellowship, one of Canada's most distinguished research awards.
 
Grier is one of only 12 scholars at the University of Western Ontario to have received this award since its inception in 1968, and is the first honoree from the Don Wright Faculty of Music.
 
As well, Grier has earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies to support his work on the foundations of musical literacy. 
 
Grier’s project addresses a central problem in medieval musical scholarship - the processes by which musicians of the central Middle Ages (800-1100) shifted from an oral tradition to a written system.  
 
Writing affected the way music was recorded and disseminated, and historians have come to regard the use of visual materials, such as music notation, for the preservation of information as one of the distinguishing characteristics of Western culture.
 
Music, as part of the liturgy, occupied a central place in ritual, which helped define societal structure, legitimacy and hierarchy. According to Grier, the origin of musical notation marks a key moment in the development of visual, non-verbal modes of communication.            
 
Grier brings to this study a rare expertise in musicology, manuscript studies, Latin philology and textual criticism, in all of which he has achieved international recognition. His current research evolves from two earlier studies, The Critical Editing of Music and The Musical World of a Medieval Monk.
 
Grier had a distinguished career at Yale and Queen’s universities before coming to Western in 1997 and held the Edward T. Cone Membership in Music Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, 2002-3.  
 

Also from this web page:

About

Hours

Weekdays
8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
(holidays excluded)

Contact

Publisher:
Helen Connell (hconnell@uwo.ca)

Editor:
Jason Winders (newseditor@uwo.ca)

Reporter/Photographer:
Paul Mayne (pmayne@uwo.ca)

Reporter/Photographer:
Heather Travis (htravis2@uwo.ca)

Advertising Coordinator:
Denise Jones (advertise@uwo.ca)

Off-Campus Advertising Sales:
Chris Amyot, Campus Ad (campusad@sympatico.ca)

National Advertising Representative:
Campus Plus

Phone:
519-661-2045

Fax:
519-661-3921

Mail:
Western News, Suite 360
Westminster Hall
The University of Western Ontario, London N6A 3K7

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Western provides the best student experience among Canada's leading research-intensive universities.