James Grier Interview (Professor of Music History at the University of Western Ontario, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada)
James Grier is Professor of Music History at the University of Western Ontario and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His latest book is Musical Notation in the West, which spans "its origins ca. A.D. 800 to the present with a focus on how it functions as a system of non-verbal, symbolic representation."
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I initially wanted to be a composer and took my first degree in that field. After a couple of detours (second undergraduate degree in Latin language and literature, and a flirtation with a doctoral dissertation topic on labour legislation in medieval England), I wound up completing a doctorate in Medieval Studies with a musicological topic in the lyric song cultivated in Aquitaine during the twelfth century. The problems I confronted in that project included analyzing musical settings of Latin poetry and textual criticism (editorial techniques in literature that I sought to apply to music).
After three years of teaching Latin, and turning down a tenure-stream job in Classics, I wound up with a tenure-stream job in music at Queen’s University, a prestigious university in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I began publishing in medieval music and textual criticism and soon after, moved to Yale University in a non-tenured job. I continued publishing, and was fortunate to place my first book, The Critical Editing of Music, with Cambridge University Press (1996).