John Rink

John Rink is Professor of Musical Performance Studies and a Fellow of St John’s College. He studied at Princeton University, King’s College London, and the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral research was on the evolution of tonal structure in Chopin’s early music and its relation to improvisation. He also holds the Concert Recital Diploma and Premier Prix in piano from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He specialises in the fields of performance studies, theory and analysis, and nineteenth-century studies, and has published six books with Cambridge University Press, including The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (1995), Chopin: The Piano Concertos (1997), Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (2002), and Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions (with Christophe Grabowski; 2010). He is also a co-editor of Chopin Studies 2 (with Jim Samson; 2004) and the Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (with Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Eric Clarke; 2009).

John Rink directs the £2.1 million AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, which is based at the University of Cambridge in partnership with King’s College London, the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London, and in association with the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He is one of four Series Editors of The Complete Chopin – A New Critical Edition, and directs two other research projects: Chopin’s First Editions Online (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) and Online Chopin Variorum Edition (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). He was an Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and he currently chairs the Steering Committees of the AHRC’s ‘Beyond Text’ and ‘Landscape and Environment’ Strategic Programmes, in addition to serving on the AHRC’s Advisory Board. He sits on the editorial boards of Music & Letters and Musicae Scientiae, is on the Advisory Panels of Music Analysis and Musica Humana, and has served on the AHRC’s Peer Review College.

John Rink’s current PhD students are working on an ethnographic study of supernumerary performers from the Royal Opera House (Michael Byrne), seventeenth-century German keyboard pedagogy and playing techniques (John McKean), ‘collective creativity’ in studio production in 1960s Britain (Myles Eastwood; co-supervised with Nicholas Cook), and interpreting topoi in performance (Sheila Guymer; also co-supervised with Nicholas Cook). His previous PhD students include the following:

• Leslie Anne Lewis, ‘The incomplete conductor: theorizing the conductor and orchestral interpretation in the light of shared leadership practices’ (2012)
• Jonelle Daniels, ‘The interaction of words and music in the Shakespeare settings of Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine): writer/composer; score/performance’ (2011)
• Avior Byron, ‘Schoenberg as performer: an aesthetics in practice’ (2007)
• Hui Chi Khoo, ‘Playing with dynamics in the music of Chopin’ (2007)
• Anne Widén, ‘Liszt and The Musical Times: a study of reception in Victorian England’ (2006)
• Daphne Craig, ‘Interpreting metre and rhythm in five of Debussy’s Douze Etudes’ (2005)
• Sarah Smith, ‘Analysing and performing texture in Scriabin’s piano music’ (2004)
• Danae Stefanou, ‘Placing the musical landscape: performance, spatiality and the primacy of experience’ (2004)
• Peter Cornish, ‘Conception and enactment in musical performance’ (2002)
• Elaine Goodman, ‘Analysing the ensemble in music rehearsal and performance: the nature and effects of interaction in cello-piano duos’ (2000)
• Matthew Riley, ‘Attentive listening: the concept of Aufmerksamkeit and its significance in German musical thought 1770-1790’ (2000)
• Jeremy Barham, ‘Mahler’s Third Symphony and the philosophy of Gustav Fechner: interdisciplinary approaches to criticism, analysis and interpretation’ (1998).

Publications