John Butt has been awarded honorary membership of the Royal Musical Association. Honorary membership is awarded in recognition of substantial and long-standing contributions to musical scholarship.
John Butt is an exemplary musicologist and performer. He has held the Gardiner Professorship of Music at the University of Glasgow since 2001, following posts at the University of Cambridge, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Aberdeen. A specialist on Bach, music of the early eighteenth century, and performance practice, he has authored five monographs, all with Cambridge University Press: Bach Interpretation: Articulation Marks in Primary Sources of J.S. Bach (1990); Bach: Mass in B Minor (1991); Music Education and the Art of Performance in the German Baroque (1994); Playing with History: the Historical Approach to Musical Performance (2002); and Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (2010). He has also edited three volumes: The Cambridge Companion to Bach (CUP, 1997); (with Malcolm Boyd) Oxford Composer Companions: J.S. Bach (OUP, 1999); and (with Tim Carter), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music (CUP, 2005).
Butt’s contribution to performance, recording and concert culture in the UK and beyond has been equally impressive. Above all, he has released numerous, first-rate CDs as director of the Dunedin Consort, including of Handel’s Samson (2019), Ode for St Cecilia’s Day (2018), Acis and Galatea (2008), Messiah (2007), Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (2018), John Passion (2018), Matthew Passion (2008), B minor Mass (2010), Orchestral Suites (2022), and Mozart’s Requiem (2018) and C-minor Mass (2023). The Dunedin concert season for 2023-24 alone included performances at the Proms, Wigmore Hall, St. Martin in the Fields, The Queen’s Hall Edinburgh, and The Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
Butt holds an OBE (2013), and is a Fellow of the British Academy (2006). He has won two awards from Gramophone, received a nomination for a Grammy, and was the 2010 recipient of the prestigious Kohn Foundation/Royal Academy of Music Bach Prize in 2010. Service to the RMA includes acting as chair of Publications Committee. He was awarded the RMA’s Dent Medal in 2003.