Robert Hill (musician)

Robert Hill ( born November 6, 1953 in Cebu City, Philippines) is an American harpsichordist, musicologist and university professor. He has taught since 1990 at the Freiburg University of Music as professor of historical keyboard instruments and historical performance practice.

Life and work

Robert Hill was until 1974 a student of Gustav Leonhardt at the Amsterdam Conservatory. Subsequently, he studied musicology at Harvard University, where he was in 1987 his doctorate with a thesis on music of Johann Sebastian Bach 's early compositions for keyboard instruments. From 1986 to 1990 he taught at Duke University in Durham (North Carolina).

He is one of the most important practitioners of historical keyboard instruments (harpsichord, clavichord, fortepiano ) and gave countless concerts and recorded music publications in the last few decades (including with Reinhard Goebel, Dmitry Sitkovetsky and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra). His brother Keith Hill is a Manufacturer of historical keyboard instruments in Cambridge (Massachusetts ). Both are heavily involved in reconstructing According piano.

Piano since he deals with the key repertoire of about 1600 to 1900, listed on all common keyboard instruments, the harpsichord, clavichord and Lautenwerck ( gut -related harpsichord ) to the Fortepiani of Mozart, Schubert and Schumann time, as well as the modern piano. As a musician, Robert Hill attaches particular importance to make the revival of past music-making in a creative sense possible. His goal is to provide the leeway allowed to enjoy the outstanding musicians of the past in their own musical culture to recover. The task of historical performance practice he sees as an area that must be overcome by intuition and imagination in the historical image in the knowledge gaps.

Hill is director of the Institute for Historical performance practice at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg.

In 1982 he was awarded the Erwin Bodky Award for Early Music.