Paul Griffiths (writer)

Paul Anthony Griffiths OBE (born 24 November 1947) is a British music critic, novelist and librettist. He is particularly noted for his writings on modern classical music and for having written the libretti for two 20th century operas, Tan Dun's Marco Polo and Elliott Carter's What Next?.

Paul Griffiths was born in the Welsh town of Bridgend to Fred and Jeanne Griffiths. He received his BA and MSc in biochemistry from Lincoln College, Oxford, and from 1971 worked as a freelance music critic. He joined the editorial staff of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1973 and in 1982 became the chief music critic for The Times, a post which he held for ten years. From 1992 to 1996, he was a music critic for The New Yorker, and from 1997–2005, for The New York Times. A collection of his musical criticism for these and other periodicals was published in 2005 as The substance of things heard: writings about music, Volume 31 of Eastman Studies in Music.

In 1978, he also began writing reference books and monographs on classical music and composers starting with Modern music: A Concise History from Debussy to Boulez and Boulez (Volume 16 of Oxford Studies of Composers). Although the majority of these publications have dealt with 20th-century composers and their music, he has also written more general works on classical music, including The String Quartet: A History (1985), The Penguin Companion to Classical Music (2005), and A Concise History of Western Music (2006). The last of these has been translated into seven languages.

Griffiths has been a guest lecturer at institutions including the University of Southern California, IRCAM, Oxford University, Harvard University, Cornell University (Messenger Lectures, 2008) and the City University of New York Graduate Center (Old Lecture, 2013), and has served on juries for international competitions, among them the Premio Paolo Borciani and the ARD Musikwettbewerb. He was named a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002 and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, when he also won a Deems Taylor Award for his notes for Miller Theatre.

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