RCC Postdoc Seminar Talks: How to Apply and Implement a  European Council Research Grant: The Didone Project

The European Union is the main source of financing for researchers and universities within its territories as well as for American researchers seeking to establish relationships with their European counterparts. Among the most important European Union sources of funding are the European Council for Research Grants: From Starting Grants to Consolidator, Proof of Concept and Advanced Grants and all the way up to Sinergy grants which fund 6-year projects with up to 10€ million.

Professor Álvaro Torrente, Director of the Complutense Institute for Musical Science at Complutense University leads a European Research Project funded through an Advanced Grant, designed to support excellent Principal Investigators already established research leaders with a recognized track record of research achievements: Didone: The Sources of Absolute Music: Mapping Emotions in Eighteenth-Century Italian opera.

His project will create of a corpus of 4,000 digitized arias from 200 opera scores based on Metastasio’s eight most popular dramas, to be analyzed using traditional methods and big data computer technology. The comparative scrutiny of dozens of different musical settings of the same librettos will reveal how composers correlate specific dramatic circumstances and emotions with distinct poetic and musical features. The results will be applicable to three main fields: (i) opera performance; (ii) analysis and interpretation of other types of music; and (iii) composition in several scenarios, from film soundtracks to creation by Artificial Intelligence. Prof. Torrente leads this project connecting a team of Spanish researchers with colleagues at the Università degli Studi di Padova, Università di Bologna, the Teatro Real de Madrid, University of Salamanca, Pompeu Fabra University and theÖsterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

In this talk, Prof. Torrente will give an overview of the European Research Council annd the grants it offers and will explain the principles and strategies for a successful grant application as well as insight into the challenges of managing a large research project that involves managing a great deal of resources and working together with several partners. In the final part of his talk, Prof. Torrente will present the current advances and results of the Didone Project.

Speaker: Álvaro Torrente, Director of the Complutense Institute for Musical Science at Complutense University. 

Chair: Jose M. Martínez Sierra, RCC Director. 

Sponsors: RCC; Postdocs@RCC; The Didone Project.