John Rink is 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, and digital musicology, 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 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); he is also General Editor of the five-book series Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice, which Oxford University Press published in 2017-18. He co-edited one of the books – Musicians in the Making: Pathways to Creative Performance – in collaboration with Helena Gaunt and Aaron Williamon. His latest monograph – Music in Profile: Twelve Performance Studies – was published by Oxford University Press in 2024 with support from the American Musicological Society.

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 currently directs the Cambridge Centre for Musical Performance Studies, which was launched at the University of Cambridge in 2015. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Complete Chopin – A New Critical Edition, and he 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 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; he also served on the AHRC’s Advisory Board and chaired the Science in Culture Advisory Group. He sits on the editorial boards of Music & Letters, Musicology Australia and Musicologist; is on the Advisory Panels of Music Analysis and several international research projects; and has been a member of the AHRC’s Peer Review College. His honorary appointments have included Visiting Professor in the Department of Music, 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 was a member of the juries of the XVII International Chopin Competition, held in October 2015 in Warsaw, and the XVIII International Chopin Competition, held in October 2021. He will again serve on the jury of the XIX International Chopin Competition in 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’.