The Dent Medal

The Dent Medal, in memory of Edward J. Dent, is awarded by the Royal Musical Association annually to recipients selected for their outstanding contribution to musicology from a list of candidates drawn up by the Council of the Association and the Directorium of the International Musicological Society.

For 2005 the medal is awarded to JULIAN JOHNSON. Johnson was educated at Pembroke College Cambridge and Dartington College of Arts (BA Hons., 1988), and at the University of Sussex (MA, 1989), where he was awarded the D.Phil. degree in 1993. He was appointed Lecturer in Music at Sussex University in 1993, and in 2001 was appointed Fellow and Tutor in Music at St Anne's College, University of Oxford, where he is also Reader in the Faculty of Music.

Johnson's first book, Webern and the Transformation of Nature, made a major contribution to Webern studies by combining deft music analysis in the context of cultural constructions of nature in contemporary Austria. Building on revisionist scholarship that had begun to unsettle the formalist image of his music cultivated after the Second World War, the book not only dealt with musical topics unexplored in Webern's music (such as the construction of ideas of nature and landscape) but also opened a range of new hermeneutic questions engaging with music and maternal grieving, spirituality and death. Johnson thus set Webern – and potentially a great deal of music drawing on Webern – in a distinct light that showed how not only his contemporaries but also his followers could be reinterpreted.

His second book, Who Needs Classical Music?, opposed influential views in current musicology in order to rehabilitate the notion of transcendence. Music, he insisted, 'makes possible the realisation of a non-contingent sense of value'. While support for such a view could easily be found in recent work on music perception, Johnson's aim is to illuminate the deep emotional engagement listeners have with classical music through philosophical aesthetics and consideration of the practice of music in composition, performance and response. His medium is writing, not experiment. Although continually engaged with questions of music perception, he argues movingly for the study of music as a form of thought, 'an independent and highly sophisticated medium of thought and feeling in its own right'. As a passionate defence of the relevance and explanatory power of traditional musicology's approach to understanding music the book will not quickly be surpassed, while among those with opposed views his contribution continues to be a lynchpin in debates on questions of cultural imperialism and popular musics.

The central figures in Johnson's musicological world – Mahler, Schumann, Schoenberg and Webern – are all figures crucial to moments of change in music's creation of meaning; it is these moments of change that offer for him the best chance to explain something of music's ability to represent the world of thought and feeling that surrounds it. Far from seeing music as hermetic, therefore, Johnson's work aims to explain, through linking its hidden details with its history, its production and the ways in which we respond to it, how music moves us and what it is.