Biography (read more)
Scott Stonebreaker Ross was born on 1 March 1951 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and moved to France with his mother in 1964 following his father’s death, remaining there independently from age thirteen. He studied harpsichord at the Conservatoire de Nice and later at the Conservatoire de Paris, and took further classes with Kenneth Gilbert at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp, winning the prestigious Concours de Bruges in 1971. He then taught for over a decade at the School of Music of Université Laval in Quebec, where he recorded the complete harpsichord works of Rameau and Couperin, before taking a sabbatical in 1983 to record extensively for Erato and EMI, including Handel’s Eight Great Suites and Bach’s six Partitas. From 1984 to 1985 he recorded the complete 555 keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti in a landmark project for French Radio marking the composer’s 300th birthday; he died of AIDS-related pneumonia on 13 June 1989 in Assas, France, at age 38, shortly after completing his Erato recording contract.
Ross’s complete recording of Domenico Scarlatti’s 555 harpsichord sonatas — the first ever made by a single performer — remains one of the most celebrated achievements in the harpsichord discography, prized for its stylistic range, wit, and refusal to flatten the sonatas into uniformity. An unconventional figure who performed in jeans and cited Brian Eno and Philip Glass among his enthusiasms alongside Rameau and Couperin, he brought an unusually vivid, unstuffy sensibility to historically informed harpsichord playing, and his early death at the height of his powers cemented the Scarlatti cycle’s reputation as a singular, unrepeatable achievement in early-music recording.
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