Nathan Platte’s article, “Mixed Motives: Soviet Symphonies and Propagandistic Duplicity in The Iron Curtain (1948),” received a 2023 Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism. Published in the open-access journal Music & Politics, Nathan’s article on the repurposing of Soviet symphonic music in an anti-Communist Hollywood film is freely available here. Nathan was thrilled to receive this recognition for a project that originally started in graduate school and slowly developed as he taught multiple seminars at Iowa on film musicians, the Soviet Union, and wartime cinema.

This fall Nathan also published two articles informed by his work with students at Iowa. “Podcasts, Partnerships, and Laboratories for American Music,” from American Music, describes his collaborations with university students and community partners on two podcasts, Sounding Cinema and FilmCastPodScene. His chapter, “Music for Tricksters and Music as Trickster in the Classical Hollywood Score,” appeared in The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema and is deeply influenced by a book featured in Iowa’s graduate musicology reading group: Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. "I'm grateful to the students who participated in these classes, conversations, and projects," Nathan explained. "They informed my thinking on these topics and helped me explore new formats and texts that I might not have otherwise encountered."