Biography

John Platoff was Professor of Music at Trinity College in Hartford, Ct., where in 2016 he was awarded the Thomas Church Brownell Prize for Teaching Excellence.  He taught a wide range of courses in music history, music theory, and the psychology of music.  He has lectured widely, to concert audiences and at academic conferences in the United States and abroad, on subjects from Mozart’s operas, to piano music of the 18^th-20^thcenturies, to the music of The Beatles.  He created and presented a Webinar series for the San Francisco Symphony called “Symphony 101,” and was a regular pre-concert lecturer for the orchestra.

His scholarly publications focus mainly on the operas of Mozart and his contemporaries, and he has written on subjects as diverse as late Beethoven string quartets and John Lennon’s controversial song, “Revolution.”  He has also created light-hearted YouTube videos—directed by his son Nick Platoff, Principal Trombone of the Houston Symphony—about the music of Mozart and Beethoven.  The most recent is entitled “Beethoven is Rude—and You Love It!”

Platoff grew up in New Jersey and earned his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Also a pianist, he studied with Vera Tisheff, Piero Weiss, and Claude Frank in New York and at the Aspen Music Festival.