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 2007, the Dent Medal has been awarded to GEORGINA BORN, who is Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music at Cambridge University. Professor Born studied cello and piano at the Royal College of Music, and during the 1980s appeared with numerous experimental music groups, making a number of recordings. She then went on to study anthropology at University College, London, where she was awarded the Ph.D. in 1989. After stints at Brunel University and Goldsmiths' College, she moved in 1997 to Cambridge, where she was appointed to her present chair in 2006. In addition, she has held several distinguished visiting positions, including Visiting Professorships at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, and at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Stockholm. In 2010 she will deliver the Bloch Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley.

Professor Born's areas of specialization are, as one might imagine from her multi-disciplinary background, extraordinarily diverse. At base, she is best described as a cultural ethnographer: someone who uses ethnography to examine many different aspects of cultural production, but who has consistently shown a particular interest in music. This concentration is amply evident in her first book, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (University of California Press, 1995), which was ground-breaking for the manner in which it shone a spotlight on the institutional workings of one of the bastions of the late-modernist musical establishment, while setting this study in dialogue with philosophical debates on modernism, postmodernism and the avant-garde. At the same time, the book interrogated the claims and the potential of computer music, introducing an abiding concern with the nature and effects of music technologies. In this and other work, Professor Born developed several post-Adornian directions, arguing for comparative analysis of music's mediation, and for the insights to be gained by probing the historical interrelations between art musics and popular and non-Western musics. The latter is a central theme of her next book, Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (University of California Press, 2000, co-edited with David Hesmondhalgh). This collection brings together a challenging series of essays that interrogate, often under the lens of postcolonial history, music's status and its epistemological condition. The volume speaks also to another theme of Professor Born's writings: a concern with the politics of music and culture. This latter concern is prominent in her third book, which analyses contemporary media policy with a particular focus on the BBC. Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (Secker & Warburg, 2004) is a trenchant critique whose ripples are still being felt both inside and outside the institution (in 2005, for example, she was invited to give evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the review of the BBC's Charter).

The future is already rich with new directions. A recent paper for Twentieth-Century Music examines music's links with digital media, while consolidating an account of music's mediation and of its plural ontologies. Currently, Professor Born is involved with a major research initiative on improvisation, in which she leads a group on music and social aesthetics, and has an article entitled 'The Social and the Aesthetic: For a Post-Bourdieuian Sociology of Culture' forthcoming in Cultural Sociology. She recently completed a study of interdisciplinarity, including the emerging field of art-science, which has resulted in a series of articles on the distinctive modes and 'logics' of interdisciplinarity. It is already clear that her work is of critical importance to all those who wish to think more deeply about the nature of cultural meaning, in particular musical meaning, and about how this meaning is conditioned by cultural institutions, knowledge systems and technologies.

Previous winners of the Dent Medal have been:

1961	Gilbert Reaney	Great Britain
1962...