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 2006, the medal has been awarded to MARY ANN SMART. Smart studied at McGill (BMus, 1985) and McMaster (MA, 1989) Universities, before going to Cornell for her doctorate. In 1994, she became Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and in 1996 she moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where she is now Associate Professor.

Broadly speaking, Smart's work falls into two overlapping areas. First, she is one of the leading voices in the study of opera and gender, most notably through her editorship of (and contribution to) the volume Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (2000), which grew out of a conference that she organized with Elizabeth Hudson in 1995. More recently, she contributed the article 'Music and Gender' to the Harvard Dictionary of Music (2003). Secondly, this research intersects with her ongoing exploration of new approaches to nineteenth-century opera, whether through the vocal traces left by singers (explored in such articles as 'The Lost Voice of Rosine Stolz', Cambridge Opera Journal, 1994, and in the chapter on singers at the Paris Opéra in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, 2003) or through the gestural traces still audible in the works of such composers as Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Verdi and Wagner (the subject of her book Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera, 2004).

The appearance of this last work has only confirmed Smart's dominant position in her generation as a scholar of opera - a position underlined by her article 'In Praise of Convention: Formula and Experiment in Bellini's Self-Borrowings' in Journal of the American Musicological Society (2000), her New Grove Dictionary entries on Bellini and Donizetti, her edition of Donizetti's grand opéra Dom Sébastien, and her continuing work on opera and politics in Italy before Verdi. Her selection for this year's Dent Medal comes in recognition of the immense insight and influence of these works and others (not least her unusually perceptive book reviews), but also for the unfailing lucidity and poise of her prose, which has served as a model in areas of research too often dominated by jargon and a lack of attention to well-chosen language.

Previous winners of the Dent Medal have been:

1961	Gilbert Reaney	Great Britain
1962	Solange Corbin	France
1963	Dénes Bartha	Hungary
1964	Pierre Pidoux	Switzerland
1965	Barry S. Brook	USA
1966	F. Alberto Gallo	Italy
1967	William W. Austin	USA
1968	Heinrich Hüschen	West Germany
1969	Willem Elders	Holland
1970	Daniel Heartz	USA
1971	Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller	West Germany
1972	Jozef Robijns	Belgium
1973	Max Lütolf	Switzerland
1974	Andrew McCredie	Australia
1975	Martin Staehelin	West Germany
1976	-
1977	Reinhard Strohm	Great Britain
1978	Christoph Wolff	USA
1979	Margaret Bent	Great Britain
1980	Craig Wright	USA
1981	Anthony Newcomb	USA
1982	David Fallows	Great Britain
1983	Lorenzo Bianconi	Italy
1984	Iain Fenlon	Great Britain
1985	Curtis A. Price	USA
1986	Silke Leopold	West Germany
1987	Richard F. Taruskin	USA
1988	Jean-Jacques Nattiez	Canada
1989	Paolo Fabbri	Italy
1990	Christopher Page	Great Britain
1991	Roger Parker	Great Britain
1992	Kofi Agawu	Ghana
1993	Carolyn Abbate	USA
1994	Lorenz Welker	Germany
1995	Susan Rankin	Great Britain
1996	Ulrich Konrad	Germany
1997	Philip V. Bohlman	USA
1998	Rob C. Wegman	USA
1999	Gianmario Borio	Italy
2000	Philippe Vendrix	Belgium
2001	Martha Feldman	USA
2002	Laurenz Lütteken	Switzerland
2003	John Butt	Great Britain
2004	Daniel Chua	Great Britain
2005	Julian Johnson	Great Britain