Arriving in the United States at age twenty-seven, Hungarian-born Paul Henry Lang (1901-1991) went on to exert a powerful influence on musical life and scholarship in his adopted country for more than six decades. As professor of musicology at Columbia University, editor of the Musical Quarterly, a founder of the American Musicological Society, and chief music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, Lang became one of Americas foremost musical scholars and commentators. This anthology of his previously uncollected writings includes essays written throughout his career on a full array of musical subjects, as well as unpublished chapters of the book on performance practice that he was writing at the time of his death. Lang was concerned above all with safeguarding the purity of musical knowledge as reflected in both scholarship and performance. Whether addressing his fellow musicologists or the general public, he expressed a broadly humanistic conception of musicology in his erudite and entertaining writings on such diverse subjects as Bach and Handel, the historical veracity of the film Amadeus, Marxist theory and music, and the controversial issue of authenticity in performance.

Harold Meek writes from a lifetime's experience playing the horn (often first chair) in several of America's great orchestras, notably the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He shares anecdotes and insights about the joys and travails of playing under Fritz Reiner, Otto Klemperer, Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch, and others. Meek also brings together some important information about changes in the instrument itself, including a little-known letter from the great British horn virtuoso, Dennis Brain, about the virtues of different makes of horn. A valuable section prints interpretively challenging horn passages from over three dozen masterpieces, ranging from Beethoven symphonies to Weber's Der Freischutz, and evaluates the solutions offered in recordings by various prominent conductors, from Leopold Stokowski, Sir Adrian Boult, George Szell, and Herbert von Karajan to Carlo Maria Giulini, Neville Marriner, Kurt Masur, and Christopher Hogwood.