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Margaret Hilda Bent CBE, FBA is an English musicologist.
She was educated at the Acton Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls and Girton College, Cambridge University, receiving her BA in 1962 and Ph.D in 1969. She taught at Cambridge and King's College London after 1963, and became a lecturer at Goldsmiths' College in 1972. In 1975 she was appointed professor at Brandeis University and in 1981 at Princeton University, and served as department Chair in both. Bent was president from 1984-86 of the American Musicological Society, of which she is now a Corresponding Member. She returned to England in 1992 as the first female Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University, where she is now an Emeritus Fellow.
Bent's study of the Old Hall Manuscript, was a key work in scholarship on early English music. Her research centres on English, French and Italian music of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries and includes work on the medieval motet. Her studies of John Dunstaple, Philippe de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, the Roman de Fauvel, musica ficta and music and manuscripts in the Veneto, have all been highly influential; she was a pioneer in musical paleography and source studies. She co-founded and co-directed the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music serves on many editorial boards of journals and publication series, and contributed articles to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Her publications address technical matters of music theory, techniques of counterpoint, analysis, musica ficta, text-setting, and other issues that bridge notation and performance in early music, descriptions of new sources, aspects of musical transmission, stemmatics, and manuscript studies, interfaces with literary, historical and biographical questions.
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