Hans Moldenhauer was born in Mainz, Germany on December 13th 1906 and died in Spokane, Washington on October 19th, 1987. He completed five years of study under Hans Rosbaud at the Mainz Municipal College of Music before he immigrated to the United States in 1938, where he settled in Spokane, Washington. After serving in the United States Army during World War II, he returned to Spokane and was Whitworth College's first student under the G.I. Bill. He earned a bachelor's degree in music in 1945.

In 1942 he founded the Spokane Conservatory of Music. With his wife pianist Rosaleen Moldenhauer, he inaugurated a series of duo-piano programs on radio which lasted 12 years. He received his doctorate in musicology from the Chicago Musical College, Roosevelt University. His thesis, Duo-pianism, was the standard in the field of duo-pianism for many years.

His great research accomplishment was the formation of the Moldenhauer Archives, embodying some 100,000 music manuscripts, letters, and documents of unique importance to music bibliography and literature. Much of this collection has been distributed to nine institutions around the world: in the United States, at Harvard University, the Library of Congress, Northwestern University, Washington State University, and Whitworth University; in Basel, Switzerland, at the Paul Sacher Foundation; in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Zentralbibliothek; in Munich, Germany, at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; and in Vienna, Austria, at the Stadtarchiv und Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek.