Education & Professional History
Harvard College, AB; University of Minnesota, MA; Yale University, MA, MPhil, PhD
Moira Leanne Hill is a scholar of musicology with research interests in sacred music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, historical performance practice, keyboard tablature notation, and evolutionary musicology. She earned an A.B. in music from Harvard, an M.A. in musicology from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in music history from Yale. Her dissertation investigated the context, content, and impact of C. P. E. Bach’s passion settings. During her doctoral studies, she spent a year in Leipzig as Junior Fellow at the Bach Archive with assistance from a DAAD grant. After receiving her doctorate, she taught at Yale before relocating to Northfield. In 2018 she received the William H. Scheide Prize of the American Bach Society for her work on scribes employed by C.P.E. Bach. In 2023, her edition of his Passion Cantata appeared as part of a scholarly series of that composer’s complete works.
As an avid performer of works from the early music repertoire, Moira plays multiple keyboard instruments, including organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. She has studied with Eduardo Bellotti, Peter Sykes, and Murray Forbes Somerville, and has participated in numerous organ academies across Europe. She has served as assistant organist at the Hildebrandt organ of the church of St. Wenzel in Naumburg (Saale), Germany, an instrument famously inspected by J.S. Bach. Recently she has taken up Baroque and Renaissance recorder and is branching out to other early wind instruments including crumhorn and shawm.
At Carleton since 2023.