H. Wiley Hitchcock (1923–2007) was a pioneer in the field of American music studies. His Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (1969) was widely influential and has gone through four editions. It broke new ground by considering all kinds of American music, both serious and popular, for which he invented the terms “cultivated” and “vernacular.” Hitchcock's name will always be associated with Charles Ives—he and Vivian Perlis were responsible for the comprehensive Charles Ives Centennial Festival Conference held in New York and New Haven in 1974. An Ives Celebration was the book that arose from the conference; it came out in 1977, the year Hitchcock also published a short monograph on Ives. One of his last projects was a massively documented edition of 129 Songs by Ives in the American Musicological Society's series MUSA—Music of the USA (2004). But, like other American musicologists of his generation, Hitchcock first worked on European music: his expertise on seventeenth-century French composers, notably François Couperin, was recognized by his appointment in 1995 as Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Hitchcock was born near Detroit, Michigan, and earned his BA at Dartmouth College—where the piano became his instrument—and his master's at the University of Michigan. He spent a decade teaching at Michigan; another at Hunter College, New York; and in 1971 became founder-director of the Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY). He was co-editor with Stanley Sadie of the four-volume New Grove Dictionary of American Music (1986).

In 1990, A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock was published—a five-hundred-page tribute drawing on leading American scholars and composers. Hitchcock was named Distinguished Professor at CUNY in 1980 and retired in 1993. He was president of the Charles Ives Society, president of the American Musicological Society (1990–92), and editor of several important series on American music. One of his last completed projects was an edition of the first of the two operas Virgil Thomson wrote with Gertrude Stein: Four Saints in Three Acts.