The Dent Medal

The Dent Medal, struck in memory of the distinguished scholar and musician Edward J. Dent (1876–1957), has been awarded by the Royal Musical Association annually since 1961 to recipients selected for their outstanding contribution to musicology.

The Dent Medal for 2025 is awarded to BETTINA VARWIG (University of Cambridge). Professor Varwig is a leading scholar of early modern music, focusing on German musical cultures. Her major achievements include two monographs: Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology (University of Chicago Press, 2023), which received the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for a book of exceptional merit. She edited the volume Rethinking Bach (Oxford University Press, 2021), as well as Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas Story for the Neue Schütz Ausgabe (Bärenreiter Verlag, 2017), and has received both the William H. Scheide Prize of the American Bach Society (2017) and the Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association (2013). Her research has also appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Music, Music & Letters, The Journal of Musicology, Twentieth-Century Music, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Representations.

After completing a PhD at Harvard University in 2006, Varwig held a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, and a Senior Lectureship at King’s College London. She has been Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College since 2017.

Recent previous winners of the Dent Medal have been:

A full listing is available at: https://www.rma.ac.uk/grants-awards/the-dent-medal/

The Tippett Medal

The Jerome Roche Prize

The Jerome Roche Prize was inaugurated in 2001 in memory of the British scholar Jerome Roche (1942–94). The prize is awarded annually by the RMA for an outstanding article by a scholar in the early stages of their career. Award winners are invited to deliver a keynote lecture at the RMA Research Students’ Conference, held in conjunction with the British Forum for Ethnomusicology.

The Roche Prize for 2025 is awarded to PETER ASIMOV for his article ‘The Melakartas and the “République Modale”: Naturalizing Indian Scales in French Musical Modernism’, published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 149.2 (2024), pp. 383–439. This article situates the expansion of musical modality in French composition alongside the intellectual history of comparative philology, in order to explain how the Karnatic melakarta system of rāga classification, mediated via British imperial networks and tethered to racialized notions of Indo-European patrimony, was reappropriated by a generation of composers and pedagogues. The panel commended this impressively perceptive and nuanced re-examination of the well-known story of exoticism in early twentieth-century French art music and particularly enjoyed the article’s more speculative conclusion, demonstrating its wider significance.

Peter Asimov is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Music, Magdalene College, following postdoctoral fellowships at Cambridge and the Université libre de Bruxelles. He completed his PhD at Clare College, Cambridge with a thesis entitled ‘Comparative Philology, French Music, and the Composition of Indo-Europeanism from Fétis to Messiaen’.

Recent previous recipients of the Jerome Roche Prize have been:

A full listing is available at: https://www.rma.ac.uk/grants-awards/the-jerome-roche-prize/

RMA Practice Research Prize

The RMA Practice Research Prize was established in 2023 to celebrate work for which practice is the significant method of research. It will be awarded annually by the RMA for an outstanding piece of work that demonstrates originality, significance, and rigour in research. Award winners are invited to present their work at the RMA Annual Conference.

The Practice Research Prize for 2025 is awarded to SARA SALLOUM (Newcastle University) for her doctoral thesis ‘Female Lute Accomplishment and Performance Practices in Early Seventeenth-Century England’ (Durham University). The panel commended this rich and insightful work which drew on detailed performance-based practice research and recognized its potential for wider impact through further dissemination in the future. The research findings were original and engaging — of particular interest is the experiential work on how the clothes worn by female lute players shaped movement and influenced performance choices.

Previous recipients of the RMA Practice Research Prize have been:

Further details are available at: https://www.rma.ac.uk/practice-research-prize/ and at:

https://www.rma.ac.uk/?s=RMA+Practice+Research+Prize