Bent, Ian (David)
Bent, Ian (David)
Bent, Ian (David), esteemed English musicologist; b. Birmingham, Jan. 1, 1938. He was educated at the Univ. of Cambridge (B.A., 1961; B.M., 1962; M.A., 1965; Ph.D., 1969, with the diss. The Early History of the English Chapel Royal, c. 1066–1327). From 1965 to 1975 he was a lecturer at King’s Coll., Univ. of London, and then a prof. of music and head of the music dept. at the Univ. of Nottingham from 1975 to 1987. In 1982–83 he was a visiting prof. at Harvard Univ. In 1986 he became a prof. at Columbia Univ., where he was made the Anne Parsons Bender prof. of Music in 1990. With his first wife, Margaret Bent, and B. Trowell, he edited the rev. ed. of Dunstable’s works in the Musica Britannica series, VIII (1970). In 1986 he became general ed. of the series Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis. From 1990 he was active in the collaborative Eng. translations of Schenker’s The Masterworks in Music (1994–97) and Der Tonwille (2001 et seq.). Bent has devoted much of his research to the history of music theory in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. He has contributed articles to many scholarly books and journals. He also served as a senior consulting ed. (1971–80) and area ed. (1994–2000) of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, to which he contributed.
Writings
Ed. Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: A Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart (London, 1981); Analysis (London and N.Y., 1987); Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century (2 vols., Cambridge, 1994); ed. Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge, 1996).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire