Continuing our series of interviews with RMA prize winners, student committee member Yihan Jin interviewed the 2025 recipient of the Dent Medal, Professor Bettina Varwig. In this interview, Professor Varwig reflects on her academic journey, offers advice for modern musicians, and shares insights into interdisciplinary research.

Professor Bettina Varwig is a leading scholar of early modern music, working on the history of the body and the emotions, and practices of listening and performance. 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 Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas Story for the Neue Schütz Ausgabe (Bärenreiter Verlag, 2017), and has received both the William H. Schneide 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.

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Yihan Jin (YJ): Congratulations on receiving the Dent Medal for 2025! What does winning this award mean to you? And what have you learned about yourself as an academic in the interim between this award and the Jerome Roche Prize you won in 2013?

Bettina Varwig (BV): I feel very humbled and gratified to have been awarded the 2025 Dent Medal – it’s such an honour to join the ranks of the outstanding colleagues who have received it in the past, many of whom have been mentors, role models, or sources of inspiration over the course of my career so far. It’s also a very nice feeling of having a lot of hard work so amply rewarded! I have learnt a whole lot of things over the years since the Roche Prize (I hope!), but one that stands out is that you never know what you might be capable of yet. I would not have been able to predict twelve years ago where my work would take me as a thinker and writer. Looking back now, it sort of makes sense how I ended up working on the history of the body, the emotions, the affective power of musicking – but I could not have envisaged this intellectual trajectory back then. Occasionally I wonder how my younger self didn’t see these things – but intellectual horizons grow and shift in unruly ways that will always make being an academic researcher a hugely exciting and enlivening pursuit. Another thing I’ve learnt is that it is important, I think, to remain true to yourself, your interests and values, as you develop your research. There are a lot of bandwagons to jump on these days, but what I feel perhaps most pleased about in my recent work is that I feel I can really stand by what I have done, in terms of the claims I make, the kind of history I want to write, the writing style, the underlying agendas (since there is no agenda-free research), and so on – and I got to enjoy every bit of the journey!   

YJ: In your latest monograph Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology, you explore what it was like to experience music in the 17^th century. Can you give us a brief overview of your main ideas?

BV: Music in the Flesh takes as its starting point the idea that music is a bodily practice, and that human bodies are not unchanging entities but are historically and culturally shaped in ways that fundamentally affect how music is produced, heard, and felt. It then looks at what the bodies of early modern Christian Europeans were like, and how their music had the power to bring about the striking psychosomatic effects that are reported in countless historical accounts. In order to reimagine their modes of being-in-the-body, I synthesise a range of sources – from medical and anatomical texts to theological treatises, devotional primers and writings on music. I also look at musical scores afresh, reading them as somatic scripts that afford a set of bodily actions and reactions. I propose that, in order to understand these early modern musical experiences, we need to revise our modern-day Cartesian conception of the body as an inert material shell housing a disembodied, autonomous self or mind. Instead, we need to imagine an integrated body-soul that was permeated by spirits, animated in all its parts, leaky, porous and open to its environments. In this early modern anthropology, music served as an agent of affective contagion that flowed freely between its participants and had the power to transform them in body, soul and spirit. Overall, the book tries out a mode of writing history and analysing music that fully embraces the bodily basis of human experience; an approach that properly carnalises music and its history as well as our own scholarly habits.

YJ: In the same book, you point out how early modern Europeans understood the mind-body relationship differently than we do today. Do you believe modern musicians should adopt the same approach? If so, in what ways would you suggest they incorporate it into their own practice?

BV: I think musicians today should feel free to make music in whatever ways feel true and meaningful to them. I also think that there is no way that we could ever manage to recreate an early modern bodily experience, not least because their experiences back then would have been hugely diverse, ambivalent, shifting and hard to put into words, just as they are today. What I do believe is that there is much inspiration to be drawn today from this historical material, and from recognising that the dominant mode of being-in-the-body in Western modernity is just one mode among many – one which has served us well in many ways but also has its limitations. The way that our understanding of the human body has become so thoroughly medicalised, for instance, and grounded in technologies of measuring and datafication, has led to many advances in diagnosing and treating illness; but it has also sidelined a more holistic approach to human wellbeing, and produced a system of healthcare that is split down the middle between physical and mental health. In terms of our music-making practices, I have been fortunate recently to be working with a group of world-class musicians on using some of my historical research as a starting point for creatively transforming some aspects of our modern Western classical concert ritual. We have found that countering some of the body-effacing tendencies of that ritual enables some strikingly cathartic experiences among our performers and listeners. I certainly would love to see our standard concert venues, teaching practices and so on become much more body-friendly and body-focused, and see what happens from there! 

YJ: You engage deeply in interdisciplinary research. What challenges and rewards have you found in this type of research?

BV: My sense has always been that, as a music scholar, you have to be interdisciplinary in a certain way by default, because none of us these days just deal with “the notes.” As a music historian, you have to be up on methods and approaches in cultural, social, or political history; as an ethnomusicologist, you need a grounding in cultural anthropology, sociology, etc.; and if you are dealing with manuscripts, you have to know your palaeography, and so on. In my own work, I have engaged in different ways with the history of science, philosophy, theology, performance studies, sound studies, embodied cognition research, and more. I draw on these adjacent bodies of knowledge and modes of thinking in ways that seem beneficial to my own scholarly aims. What is always much more challenging, of course, is to become fully expert in any of the disciplines from which we borrow. It is hugely enriching to learn from what is going on in other fields, but to make a grounded contribution to those other discourses is quite a different matter. I think my latest book does speak to a number of issues that run across various disciplines, such as affect theory, the formation of the Western modern subject, and, not least, what it is to be human. If the book offers colleagues who work on these questions some suggestions for how an engagement with music can form a uniquely productive source of insight, that would be a very gratifying outcome.

YJ: Given your experience, what advice would you give to early-career researchers who want to cross disciplinary boundaries?

BV: My advice would be to be bold but humble: There is a vast range of exciting scholarship out there, in the cloud (mostly), for us all to absorb, digest, and put to good use for our own purposes. The sheer amount of what is available and the number of directions one might go in can be overwhelming, so I feel it is important to be selective and thorough at the same time. That might sound like a paradox, but since there is no way that any one person can read everything in their own field, let alone another related discipline, we need to choose the items on our reading lists judiciously and then attend to them fully and fairly. It takes some continuous engagement with a particular body of research to be able to decipher that discourse in all its nuances, and you’d want to make that effort not just in order to tick the ‘interdisciplinarity’ box, but when the need arises urgently from your project or sustained curiosity takes you there. When encountering so many scholars only on a screen through their published work, it is easy to forget that they are flesh-and-blood individuals, too, whose work is (usually) the product of many hours of intense effort and careful thinking. So ideally, we’d approach their contributions with sensitivity, attention to detail and a willingness to learn, rather than just mining their work for the odd juicy quote. Best of all, I’d say, is to use conferences, public lectures and other events as an opportunity to dip your toe into other fields, and/or to meet in person some of the people whose work you draw on, so that your engagement with their scholarship can become genuinely dialogic.