Robert Riggs, professor of music and chair of the music department at the University of Mississippi, teaches music history, violin, and viola. A member of the faculty since 1987, he has also taught at the University of Utah and the New England Conservatory of Music. He studied violin at the University of New Mexico (with David Cole, Kurt Frederick, and Leonard Felberg), at the Meadowmount School in New York (with Dorothy DeLay), and in Boston (with Emanuel Borok). Riggs’s professional performing experience includes a five-year engagement with the orchestra of the Lower Saxon State Opera House in Hannover, Germany, and ten years of free-lance work in Boston with the Handel and Haydn Society, SinfoNova, the Boston Lyric Opera, and the Harvard Chamber Orchestra. He is currently a member of the Oxford Piano Trio, which has performed over sixty major works from the standard repertoire on concerts throughout the state, region, and at conferences in Toronto and Berlin.

Riggs received his A.M. and Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard University, where his major professors included Christoph Wolff, Lewis Lockwood, and Luise Vosgerchian. He has delivered numerous research papers at national and international meetings of the College Music Society, the American Musicological Society, the International Musicological Society, and the International Mozart Congress in Salzburg. He has published articles on Mozart, aesthetics, and historical performance in leading journals: Musical Quarterly, Journal of Musicology, College Music Society Symposium, and Mozart-Jahrbuch. His book, Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher, was published in 2010 by the University of Rochester Press in its Eastman Studies in Music series. He is currently writing a book, also for the University of Rochester Press, on violin repertoire and performance.