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 2015 the Dent Medal is awarded to MARINA FROLOVA-WALKER, Professor of Music History at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Fellow of Clare College.

Professor Frolova-Walker was educated at the Moscow Conservatoire, from which she graduated with a Ph.D. in 1994. Her first full-time academic appointment was at Goldsmiths College, University of London (1997), and was followed by lectureships first at the University of Southampton (1999) and then at the University of Cambridge (2000). She has been the recipient of a number of research grants, including a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2010–13), and in 2014 was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy.

After early work on the symphonies of Schumann and his influence on Tchaikovsky, her work has been concerned with constructions of Russian nationalism, and includes a landmark article in the Cambridge Opera Journal (1997) entitled ‘On “Ruslan” and Russianness’. Later studies on opera in Russia include ‘National in Form, Socialist in Content’ (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 1998),‘Grand Opera in Russia: Fragments from an Unwritten History’ (The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, CUP, 2003), ‘Russian Opera: Between Modernism and Romanticism’ (The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera, CUP, 2005), ‘The Soviet Opera Project: Ivan Dzerzhinsky vs. Ivan Susanin’ (Cambridge Opera Journal, 2006) and ‘Opera and Obsolescence in the Russian Culture Wars’ (Opera Quarterly, 2009). These are among an impressive collection of articles and chapters that have done much to reorientate prevailing views of the subject.

Alongside her forensic critique of the nature of Russian musical nationalism, Frolova-Walker has also placed socialist realism under the microscope in contributions such as ‘The Glib, the Bland, and the Corny: An Aesthetic of Socialist Realism’ (in Music and Dictatorship in Europe and Latin America, ed. Roberto Illiano and Massimiliano Sala, Brepols, 2009). A summation of her views is to be found in the magisterial volume Russian Music and Nationalism: From Glinka to Stalin (Yale University Press, 2007), which was succeeded by the trenchant study Music and Soviet Power, 1917–32 (with Jonathan Walker; Boydell & Brewer, 2012).

Previous winners of the Dent Medal have been: