Nathan Platte teaches courses on film music and other 20th- and 21st-century topics for the School of Music and Department of Cinematic Arts. His research explores the sound of Hollywood’s studio era from a variety of angles, including the collaborative process of film scoring, the intersection of technology and music, the role of studio orchestras, and soundtrack albums. This work has taken him to film and music-related archives around the country, and he has contributed to conferences on film sound and archival research at the Library of Congress and the British Library.

His articles have appeared in The Journal of Musicology, Music & Politics, 19th-Century Music, and The Journal of the Society for American Music, Music and the Moving Image, and The Journal of Film Music. Platte has also contributed essays to many anthologies, including The Cambridge Companion to George Gershwin (2019), Voicing the Cinema (2020), The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical (2022), The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema (2023), and The Cambridge Companion to Stephen Sondheim (forthcoming).

Platte’s books include The Routledge Film Music Sourcebook (Routledge, 2012; coedited with James Wierzbicki and Colin Roust) and Franz Waxman’s “Rebecca”: A Film Score Guide (Scarecrow Press, 2012; coauthored with David Neumeyer). His book, Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood (Oxford University Press, 2018), illuminates the collaborative dynamics of film music through the perspectives of musicians, producers, directors, screenwriters, and publicists.

Platte has worked as a writer, producer, and co-host for two podcasts: Sounding Cinema (2020–2025), a film music podcast made in collaboration with students, and FilmCastPodScene (2020–2023), a podcast cohosted with Rebecca Fons and Ben Delgado, the programming directors of Iowa City’s independent cinema, FilmScene.

Platte received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he also completed bachelor’s degrees in history and trombone performance. Before joining the faculty at the University of Iowa in 2011, he taught at Michigan and Bowling Green State University. He served as President for the Midwest chapter of the American Musicological Society from 2020 to 2022.

Courses Taught
• History of Western Music I (Antiquity–Baroque)
• Introduction to Film Music
• The Film Musical
• Twentieth-Century Music

Other recent topics include:
• Musical Lives in the Soviet Union
• Spiritual Journeys in Music of the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries
• The Sounds and Strains of Genre in Film Music
• Collaborative Sonic Styles in Film
• Musical Lives during the World Wars I and II