BIOGRAPHY

In 2016, James Grier, Professor of Music History, University of Western Ontario, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is an award-winning scholar recognized internationally as one of the foremost researchers in medieval music.  His work is supported by SSHRC (1989-90, 1998-2001, 2002-5, 2006-9, 2010-13, 2014-19, 2021-26); and fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2002), the Killam Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities and American Council of Learned Societies (all 2009); and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2020).  His specialized studies on the musical legacy of the eleventh-century monk Adémar de Chabannes appear in The Musical World of a Medieval Monk (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and an edition of Adémar’s music; as well as a palaeographic study of his music hand (Brepols, 2012, 2018).  Two monographs, The Critical Editing of Music (translated into Spanish, Japanese translation forthcoming) and Musical Notation in the West (Cambridge 1996, 2021), have become standard works in the field of musicology and performance studies.  His current research concerns the origins of musical literacy in the medieval West, where he is investigating the development of musical notation as a non-verbal, symbolic language, and the strategies musicians created to comprehend it.