The American harpsichordist and musicologist Robert Hill has been Professor of Historical Keyboard Instruments and Performance Practice at the Freiburg Musikhochschule since 1990. He studied with Gustav Leonhardt at the Amsterdam Conservatory, graduating in 1974, and later earned his PhD in musicology at Harvard University for a dissertation under Christoph Wolff on the early keyboard music of J.S. Bach. From 1986–1990 he was Assistant Professor of Musicology at Duke University.

One of the most distinguished performers on early keyboard instruments, harpsichord, clavichord, lute-harpsichord and fortepiano, in the last decades he has collaborated with Reinhard Goebel, Dmitri Sitkovetsky and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, among others.

As a player Robert Hill performs keyboard repertoire from the late Renaissance to the Neoclassical periods, and as a musicologist he actively researches the reconstruction of nineteenth-century performance practice, in particular the lost tradition of tempo modification.