He studied with Charles Wood at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, succeeding the latter on the post of music professor in 1926. Dent published pioneering research on, among others, Alessandro Scarlatti, Ferruccio Busoni, Mozart operas, and the development of the opera in England. He translated the libretto of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, then little known in his country, and was largely responsible for the 1911 Cambridge production of that opera.
In 1931–49, Dent was the head of the Société Internationale de Musicologie. He was also a member of many other international and national societies, and a founding member of the British Society for the Study of Sexual Psychology (1913), which, among others, opposed the legal discrimination of homosexuals by propagating a scientific approach to the subject.
(ISCM, est. 1922) and its long-time president (later from 1938 – an honorary president). As an excellent moderator and diplomat, he prudently handled the ISCM’s policies. It was in the context of the ISCM that he maintained contacts with Koffler.
Around 1935 Koffler dedicated to Dent his String Quartet, Op. 19 (later listed as Op. 20), whose score has recently been recovered. Their mutual relations became tense early in 1936, however, when Koffler put forward his concept of a new ISCM statute, answering the need for the Society’s reform in the face of changing social and political circumstances. Koffler envisaged a transformation of the ISCM into a more politically involved and expansive body running such additional projects as its own journal, music library, and a ‘propaganda bureau’. The statute that was eventually passed in 1937 in Paris (after long negotiations and consultations), however, proved very similar to its predecessor, and Koffler’s ideas were discarded for the most part.
Since 1961, the Royal Musical Association of the UK has awarded the Dent Medal for outstanding contributions to musicology, struck in memory of that distinguished scholar.