John Platoff, Professor of Music, received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.  He also spent several years in New York City as a piano student and performer, and studied at the Aspen Music Festival with Claude Frank.  Prior to his arrival at Trinity College he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at the New School of Music in Philadelphia.  He has also taught as a Visiting Lecturer at Yale University.

As a music historian, Platoff helps students develop the skills both of musicians and historians.  As musicians, his students learn to understand what the great composers of the past have created: how musical works are put together and how they communicate meaning to listeners.  As historians, his students grapple with the profound differences between the circumstances of people living in the past and those of our own era.  No piece of music means the same thing to later generations as it did to the audience for whom it was created; by thinking critically about the world in which a composer like Mozart or Beethoven lived and worked, students can achieve a deeper understanding of both their music and their time.

• Platoff, John. “Francesco Benucci, Nancy Storace, and Sarti’s Fra i due litiganti in Vienna.” International Conference “Giuseppe Sarti,” Berlin, July 18, 2014.
• Platoff, John.  “Searching for Sincerity in Mozart’s String Quartet K. 421: The Legacy of Romanticism (with Reflections on the Career of Ice Cube),” Annual Meeting, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, San Antonio, Texas, March 23, 2012.
  
• Platoff, John.  “The Beatles and the Rolling Stones Get Political: ‘Revolution’ and ‘Street Fighting Man’,“ Boston University, November 29, 2011.
  
• Platoff, John. Review of Mozart’s Viennese Instrumental Music: A Study of Stylistic Re-Invention, by Simon P. Keefe (Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY, 2007) and Mozart’s Piano Music, by William Kinderman (Oxford and New York, 2006).  Journal of the American Musicological Society 61 (2008), 615-25.
  
• Platoff, John. “John Lennon, 'Revolution', and the Politics of Musical Reception.”  The Journal of Musicology 22 (2005): 241-67.
  
• Platoff, John. "Operatic Ensembles and the Problem of the Don Giovanni Sextet."  In Opera buffa in Mozart’s Vienna, edited by Mary Hunter and James Webster, Cambridge, 1997, 378-405.
• Platoff, John. "Myths and Realities about Tonal Planning in Mozart’s Operas."  Cambridge Opera Journal 8 (1996): 3-15.
• Platoff, John. "Catalogue Arias and the 'Catalogue' Aria."  In Wolfgang Amadè Mozart: Essays on His Life and Music, edited by Stanley Sadie, Oxford, 1996, 296-311.
• Platoff, John. "Tonal Organization in 'Buffo' Finales and the Act II Finale of 'Le nozze di Figaro'." Music and Letters 72 (1991): 387-403.
• Platoff, John. "Musical and Dramatic Structure in the Opera Buffa Finale."  The Journal of  Musicology 7 (1989): 191-230.
• Platoff, John, and David L. Brodbeck. "Dissociation and Integration: The First Movement of Beethoven's Opus 130." Nineteenth Century Music 7 (1983-84): 149-62.

• Thomas Church Brownell Prize for Teaching Excellence, 2016
• Faculty Research Expense Grants, Trinity College, 2000-01 and 2014-15
• Faculty Research Grants, Trinity College, 1990-91 and 1996-97
• Summer Seminar, "Form and Drama in Mozart's Operas," National Endowment for the Humanities, Cornell University, 1988
• Fellowship for College Teachers, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1986-87
• Mellon Grant for Collaborative Study, for the Eighteenth-Century Study Group, Trinity College, 1986
• Junior Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College, 1985
• Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation Grant-in-Aid, 1983-84
• Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1980-84
• Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, University of Pennsylvania, 1980
• Presser Foundation Scholarship in Music, 1973