Advisory Board

Dr. Lisa Colton directs the Centre for the Study of Music, Gender and Identity (MuGI) at the University of Huddersfield. Her reserch focuses on intersections between Western music, gender and sexuality within diverse chronological contexts, from medieval motets to the songs of Lady Gaga. She is currently working on Angel Voices: Medieval English Music History (Ashgate), and is co-editing two volumes stemming from MuGI conferences activities: Gender, Age and Musical Creativity, with Catherine Haworth (Ashgate 2015), and Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners and Users of Music Before 1600, with Tim Shephard. Her work has appeared in Music and Letters, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Contemporary Music Review, Early Music and Plainsong and Medieval Music. Future plans include research relating to medievalism in the music of British composer Margaret Lucy Wilkins.

Mary Ann Smart is Gladyce Arata Terrill Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on social dimensions of opera in nineteenth-century Europe. Her publications include (ed.) Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Smart’s current projects are the book Risorgimento Fantasies: Opera and Politics in Italy to 1848 (forthcoming 2011) and a study of the audio-visual politics of operatic staging over the past 30 years.

Laura Tunbridge is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Manchester. She read music at Oxford, and in 2002 gained a PhD from Princeton, with a dissertation on Robert Schumann’s music for Byron’s Manfred and the Szenen aus Goethe’s Faust. In 2007 Cambridge University Press published Tunbridge’s book Schumann’s late style; her Cambridge Introduction to the Song Cycle is currently in press. She is  particularly interested in gender issues related to the lied.

We are pleased to announce that this year’s Dent Medal, struck in memory of the distinguished scholar and musician Edward J. Dent (1876–1957), has been awarded to Laura Tunbridge.
Excerpt from the announcement:
Tunbridge’s work is distinguished by her dedication to the historical specificity and contingency of musical meaning, whether unpicking the way that Schumann’s biography shaped the reception of his music, the role of recording technology in communicating the idea of a song cycle, or the agency of performers (or radio producers, or filmmakers) as they engage with and interpret repertoires we think we know. In The Song Cycle, this led Tunbridge to challenge musicologists to take seriously as song cycles concept albums by twentieth-century popular artists as disparate as Joni Mitchell and Radiohead alongside earlier, “classic” examples by Schubert and Schumann. Singing in the Age of Anxiety, meanwhile, is exemplary in its subtle, productive intertwining of performing and cultural histories.
Tunbridge’s scholarly achievements are particularly remarkable given the work she has also undertaken as an administrator and public intellectual.
Read the full citation here: rma.ac.uk/2021/06/18/dent-medal-for-2021-awarded-to-laura-tunbridge
The Dent Medal has been awarded by the Royal Musical Association annually since 1961 to recipients selected for their outstanding contribution to musicology. A list of candidates is drawn up by the RMA Council and the IMS Directorium. Further details on the award: musicology.org/dent-medal