Robert Zappulla

Robert Zappulla spent many years in Stonington serving as ZHI's Resident Harpsichordist and Musicologist, and he has retained his close association with the company since his departure in 2001 to begin teaching music at the university level. He studied harpsichord with David Schulenberg, Raymond Erickson, and R. Peter Wolf while an undergraduate music student at SUNY/Stony Brook, and his interest in music history and theory prompted him to earn master's degrees in those fields, as well as one in harpsichord performance, at Duke and Rutgers universities.

As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied harpsichord with Gustav Leonhardt at the Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam for one year, and, while there, he decided to write a doctoral dissertation in historical musicology for Utrecht University. His recent book, Figured Bass Accompaniment in France (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2000; preface by Ton Koopman), is a comprehensive study of the numerous French accompaniment treatises produced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Dr. Zappulla is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Music at Claremont Graduate University in California, and he performs frequently in the Los Angeles area; he has also performed throughout North America and much of Europe. In 2000 he accepted the co-editorship (with harpsichordist Igor Kipnis, who passed away in 2002) of Routledge's Encyclopedia of the Harpsichord and Clavichord, which is due to appear in 2003.

Download mp3 files of a live, unedited recording of Prof. Zappulla's September 2001 harpsichord concert in Claremont, CA.