joined the music faculty of Columbia University in 1934 with the first professorship of musicology in America, 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, Lang 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, Dika Newlin, Joel Sachs, Rose 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 from 1954 to 1964 the chief 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), called "[a] model of scholarship and style" by Will Durant. He was an adviser to his publisher, W.W. Norton, and edited several books for them. He was a founding member of the American Musicological Society and in 1955 was elected for a term as president of the International Musicological Society. In addition to his most famous work, Music in Western Civilization, Lang wrote George 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. In 1936 he married Anne Pecheux, a Barnard graduate who had taken his undergraduate music history course. They had four children. Among Lang's pupils were Mary Ann Feldman and Walter H. Rubsamen. He died in Lakeville, Connecticut, aged 90. References Bibliography Further reading 1901 births 1991 deaths 20th-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century American musicologists American music critics Columbia University faculty Cornell University alumni Handel scholars Hungarian emigrants to the United States Hungarian musicologists International Musicological Society presidents People from Lakeville, Connecticut Vassar College faculty Wells College faculty Writers from Budapest