Bachelor of Music with Distinction, Piano, Eastman School of Music; Master of Music, Piano, Pius XII Institute, Florence Italy; and Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in musicology, New York University. Research in Madrid, Spain, for her dissertation was supported by a Fulbright grant. Professor Espinosa also studied harpsichord at the Richard Strauss Conservatory, Munich, and musicology at the University of Munich.
Performance practice and keyboard music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with an emphasis on music written at the Royal Chamber of Spain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Representative publications include "The Keyboard Works of Felix Maximo Lopez: An Anthology" (University Press of America, 1983); "Felix Maximo Lopez, Franz Joseph Haydn and the Art of Homage," Early Keyboard Journal, XVI-XVII (1909-1988); and "Musica de Clave de Felix Maximo Lopez: Realmente para Clave?"
After teaching for a year at the University of Oklahoma, in 1977 Alma Espinosa joined the full-time faculty of the Department of Music at UML.