| 1 | Name: | Dr. Margaret Bent | |
| Institution: | All Souls College, Oxford | ||
| Year Elected: | 2013 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1940 | ||
Margaret Bent read Music at Cambridge (where she was Organ Scholar at Girton College), gaining the Ph.D. in 1969 with a dissertation on the early fifteenth century Old Hall Manuscript. She taught peripatetically and at Goldsmiths’ College, London, before going to the United States in 1975, holding professorships and departmental chairmanships successively at Brandeis (1975-81) and Princeton Universities (1981-92), when she returned to the U.K. as the first woman Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, of which she is now an Emeritus Fellow. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, an honorary Fellow of Girton College, and was appointed CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2008. She holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Glasgow, Notre Dame and Montréal. Honorific or corresponding memberships or fellowships include the American Musicological Society (of which she was President 1984-6), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Historical Society, Academia Europea , the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Medieval Academy of America, the London University School of Advanced Studies, the Royal Musical Association. Her most recent visiting professorships were at Villa I Tatti, Florence, and the Universities of Chicago, Harvard and Basel, and she serves on a number of editorial boards. In 2019 she shared the Guido Adler Prize of the International Music Association with fellow APS member Lewis Lockwoord, in honor of "scholars who have made an outstanding contribution to musicology." Apart from a critical edition of Rossini’s opera Il Turco in Italia, her publications range widely over English, French and Italian music of the 14th to 16th centuries, including editions (some joint) of John Dunstaple, Old Hall, English masses, and Johannes Ciconia. A facsimile and study of the 15th-century Veneto manuscript Bologna Q15: The Making and Remaking of a Musical Manuscript (LIM, Lucca, 2008) won the Claude Palisca prize of the AMS. Other books include: Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica Ficta (London and New York: Routledge, 2002); Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Margaret Bent and Robert Klugseder, A Veneto Liber cantus (c. 1440): Fragments in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, and the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2012). Full listing of publications can be accessed at http://www.all-souls.ox.ac.uk/people.php?personid=4 (classified by subject) and http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/index.php?id=844 (chronological). Known for revisionist and often controversial contributions in several areas of late-medieval music theory and practice, her work has overturned long-held suppositions about manuscript relationships and datings, meanings of notational signs, interpretations of medieval writings, and modern historiographical impositions (notably concepts of isorhythm, chromaticism, diminution). Starting points are nearly always manuscripts, notation, archives, texts, genres (especially motets). She addresses compositional and analytical techniques, counterpoint, musical grammar and rhetoric, the construing and complementing of notations, codicological and stemmatic issues. She has described (and sometimes discovered) manuscript fragments and reconstructed their music, and is currently documenting musical networks in the Veneto. She co-founded the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (http://www.diamm.ac.uk/), continues to lead early music seminars and singing sessions from original notation in facsimile in Oxford, and is a closet pianist, viol player and Wagnerian. Margaret Bent was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |||