Leo Sowerby

From the 1920s to the 1940s, Leo Sowerby created popular secular works while his sacred compositions led admirers to call him the dean of American church musicians. Yet in time, Sowerbys Pulitzer Prize-winning The Canticle of the Sun and the rest of his corpus lost favor with the A-list symphonies and prominent musicians who had once made him a fixture in their repertoires. Joseph Sargents biography offers the first focused study of Sowerbys life and work against the backdrop of the composers place in American music. As Sargent shows, Sowerbys present-day marginalization as a composer relates less to the quality of his work than the fact that todays historiographical practices and canon-building activities minimize modern church music. Sargents re-evaluation draws on a wide range of perspectives and composers music and writings to enrich detailed analyses of musical works and a career-spanning consideration of Sowerbys musical language and aesthetic priorities.