Professor Emma Dillon, from the Department of Music, has successfully obtained a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for her project ‘Musical Lives: Towards an Historical Anthropology of French Song, 1100-1300’.

The grant has provided £2 million to the project and obtaining the grant required a proven track record of significant research achievements in the last ten years. 

'I'm absolutely delighted by the news, and also deeply grateful to the ERC for funding my project,' Professor Dillon said.

'The grant will allow me to assemble an international interdisciplinary team of performers and scholars for a five-year collaboration to examine one of the earliest notated traditions of vernacular song, that of French trouvère song.'

'The aim of Musical Lives is to turn the spotlight on song-making and singing as a social practice, to better understand how songs shaped the lives, relationships and memories of the people who made, performed and listened to them. Particularly exciting is the opportunity to examine the tradition in a transnational context, tracing itineraries of song-makers across the Mediterranean, from Calais, to Palermo, to Acre, and to consider the possibilities for interactions across linguistic boundaries of medieval Arabic, French, Hebrew and Occitan song. I can't wait to get started!'

Musical Lives is an interdisciplinary study of the earliest surviving French song repertories in the period of their creation and early transmission between the years 1100 and 1300.

The European Research Council announced the winners of its 2021 Advanced Grants competition on 26 April 2022. The funding, worth in total €624.6 million, will go to 253 leading researchers across Europe.