Paul Henry Lang

Paul Henry Lang (August 28, 1901, Budapest – September 21, 1991, Lakeville, Connecticut) was a Hungarian-American musicologist and music critic.

Lang was born in Budapest, Hungary, and studied at the Budapest Music Academy, under Zoltán Kodály, among others. He graduated in 1922, and from 1922–24 played bassoon in various orchestras. Encouraged to study musicology by Kodály and Béla Bartók, he did so at the University of Heidelberg and later the Sorbonne in Paris. In the 1924 Summer Olympics Lang participated as part of the University of Paris's rowing team. In 1928 he graduated with a degree in literature. While a student in Paris he began his career as a music critic writing for the Revue Musicale.

In 1928, knowing no English,^[1] Lang moved to the United States as a junior scholar of the Rockefeller Foundation, then taught music at Vassar College (1930–31), and Wells College (1932–33). At the same time he he worked on a dissertation in French literature and philology, with French opera as his specialty, earning a doctorate degree from Cornell University in 1934. Mr. Lang joined the music faculty of Columbia University in 1933 with the first professorship of musicology in America,^[2] and quickly began changing the way music was taught there by adding courses, such as the esthetics of music, and by expanding the musicology department. In 1940, after Bartók fled Hungary during World War II, Lang arranged for Columbia to hire him as an ethnomusicologist. As musicology was a nascent field at the time, he had a strong influence on its development, especially in the United States, and advised a number of students who would go on to become prominent musicologists, including James McKinnon, Joel Sachs, Rosengard Subotnik, Richard Taruskin, Piero Weiss, and Neal Zaslaw.

Lang became best known for his often provocative articles and books on both contemporary trends in music and music history. He was for years the music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, succeeding Virgil Thomson, and was editor of The Musical Quarterly from 1945 to 1973. He published a number of books, the most famous of which is Music in Western Civilization (1941).

In addition to his most famous work, Music in Western Civilization, Lang wrote Georg Frideric Handel, collaborated with Otto Bettmann on A Pictorial History of Music, and edited several compilations, including The Creative World of Mozart and One Hundred Years of Music in America.

References

1. ^ Letter from Paul Henry Lang's wife, Anne Pecheux Lang, in letter to the New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2006/mar/23/paul-henry-lang/. Retrieved July 12, 2011.
2. ^ Anne Pecheux Lang letter,

• Kozinn, Allan (September 24, 1991). "Paul Lang, Musicologist and Critic, Is Dead at 90". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE2D7163DF937A1575AC0A967958260. Retrieved May 22, 2010. 

See also: Lang (surname)

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Name	Lang, Paul Henry
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Date of birth	August 28, 1901
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Date of death	September 21, 1991
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