Professor John Rink

John Rink is Emeritus Professor of Music in the Cambridge Faculty of Music, and Fellow in Music at 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, nineteenth-century music (especially Chopin), theory and analysis, digital musicology, and genetic criticism. His monographs include Chopin: The Piano Concertos (1997), Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions (with Christophe Grabowski; 2010), and Music in Profile: Twelve Performance Studies (2024). His edited volumes range from The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (1995) and Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (2002) to Chopin Studies 2 (with Jim Samson; 1994) and the Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (with Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Eric Clarke; 2009). He was also General Editor of OUP's five-book series Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice (2017-18). He co-edited one of the books in the series – Musicians in the Making: Pathways to Creative Performance – in collaboration with Helena Gaunt and Aaron Williamon.

John Rink directed the £2.1 million AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, which was based at the University of Cambridge from 2009 to 2015 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 Editor-in-Chief of The Complete Chopin – A New Critical Edition, and he directs 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 also Principal Investigator of the project 'Cross-cultural perspectives on the creative development of choirs and choral conductors', which was pursued in collaboration with the Universidade de São Paulo and funded by the British Academy. 

He was an Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and he chaired the Steering Committees of the AHRC's 'Beyond Text' and 'Landscape and Environment' Strategic Programmes, as well as the Science in Culture Advisory Group; he was also a member of the AHRC's Advisory Board and Peer Review College. He has served on the editorial boards of Music & Letters, Musicology Australia and Musicologist, and on the advisory panels of Music Analysis and several international research projects. His honorary appointments have included Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London; Guest Professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music; Visiting Professor in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London; Guest Professor, Shanghai Normal University; and Ong Teng Cheong Visiting Professor in Music, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore. He is also a Fellow of the British Asiatic Society.

He served on the juries of the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2015, 2021 and 2025. In 2017 he was invited to join the Society for Musicology in Ireland as a Corresponding Member, and he also became the inaugural Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities, holding this role for two years. In 2019 he received the Bene Merito honorary distinction from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs for contributions to the 'strengthening of Poland’s status in the international arena'.