Paul Henry Lang

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Paul Henry Lang (August 28, 1901 – September 21, 1991) 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. He was encouraged to study musicology by Kodály and Béla Bartók, which he went to the University of Heidelberg and later the University of Paris to do. Alongside his studies, he participated in the 1924 Summer Olympics with the University of Paris's rowing team, and he graduated in 1928 with a degree in literature. While a student in Paris he also began his career as a music critic, writing for the Revue Musicale.

He moved to the United States in 1929 and worked first for the Rockefeller Foundation, then as a music instructor at Vassar College (1930–31), at Wells College (1932–33), and finally at Columbia University, where he would stay on the faculty from 1933 to his retirement in 1970. Meanwhile he earned a doctorate degree from Cornell University in 1934. He became a major figure in Columbia's musicology department, helping to greatly expand it, including arranging for it to hire Bartók after the latter fled Hungary in 1940 during World War II. As musicology was a nascent field at the time, he had a large 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 and controversial articles and books on both contemporary trends in music and the history of music. 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).