John Platoff grew up in northern New Jersey, where he studied the piano with Vera Tisheff.  After graduating in music from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 summa cum laude, he continued his studies in piano in New York and at the Aspen Music Festival with Claude Frank and Piero Weiss.  His solo recitals included performances in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York, and at the Philomathean Art Gallery in Philadelphia.  During his years in New York he also worked at the Frick Art Reference Library, doing research on European painting.  In 1978 he returned to do graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, completing his Ph.D. in 1984 with a dissertation on the operatic finales of Mozart and his Viennese contemporaries.

At Trinity he teaches a wide variety of courses in Western music history, along with courses in music theory and the psychology of music and a first-year seminar entitled "The Beatles and the Sixties".  His principal research focuses on the Italian operas by Mozart and the other leading composers of Mozart's time, such as Salieri.  He has also written about Beethoven's string quartets, and is currently writing an article on the different versions of the Beatles song "Revolution".
                                                                            See Attached C.V.
List of courses taught:
Music 101.  Theory I.  Basic Musicianship
Music 121.  Listening to Music
Music 152.  Italian Music of the Renaissance and Baroque
Music 164.  Mozart and 18th-Century Music
Music 211.  The History of Western Music I
Music 212.  The History of Western Music II
Music 213.  The History of Western Music III
Music 218.  The Psychology of Music
Music 321.  Style in the Renaissance: Claudio Monteverdi
Music 323.  The Operas of Mozart
Music 324.  The Age of Beethoven
Music 325.  The Operas of Verdi
FYSM 181. The Beatles and the Sixties

Selected recent publications and presentations:
"Why Two 'Revolution's?" Beatles 2000 International Conference, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, June 17, 2000

"A Context for Mozart’s Da Ponte Operas: Salieri’s La grotta di Trofonio and Paisiello’s Il Re Teodoro in Venezia," 29th Annual Meeting, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 2, 1998

"Tonal Organization in the opera buffa of Mozart’s Time."  Mozart Studies 2, ed. by Cliff Eisen (Oxford, 1997), 139-74

"Operatic Ensembles and the Problem of the Don Giovanni Sextet."  Opera buffa in Mozart’s Vienna, ed. by Mary Hunter and James Webster (Cambridge, 1997), 378-405

"Myths and Realities about Tonal Planning in Mozart’s Operas." Cambridge Opera Journal 8 (1996), 3-15

"Catalogue Arias and the 'Catalogue' Aria."  Wolfgang Amadè Mozart: Essays on His Life and Music, ed. by Stanley Sadie (Oxford, 1996), 296-311