Irving Lowens (19 August 1916 – 14 November 1983) was an American musicologist, critic, and librarian in the Washington, D.C. area. He served as the chief music critic at the Washington Star newspaper, the Assistant Head of the music division of the Library of Congress, and the dean of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Lowens was president of the Music Library Association, executive board member of the American Musicological Society, and founder of the Music Critics Association of North America and the Sonneck Society, later renamed the Society for American Music. Lowens was instrumental in improving working conditions for American critics as well as increasing standards of criticism. His main interests and scholarly works concerned American tunebooks, of which he held a significant collection. This collection contains some 2,000 volumes including American hymnals and psalm books from the 18th and 19th centuries. The collection now resides at the Moravian Music Foundation [1] in Winston-Salem, NC. While neither Moravian in content nor in origin, the Lowens Collection is an extremely valuable resource for hymnological study, both in music and texts.