Today’s date marks two important anniversaries in the life of American composer, teacher, and organist Leo Sowerby, who lived from 1895 to 1968. Sowerby was born on May 1st in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and, on his 32nd birthday in 1927, was hired as the permanent organist and choirmaster at St. James’ Church in Chicago, where he remained on the job for the next 35 years.

A prolific composer, Sowerby wrote hundreds of pieces of church music for organ and chorus, plus an impressive body of chamber and symphonic works, which are only recently receiving proper attention.

It’s not that Sowerby was exactly neglected during his lifetime – he won a number of musical awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 – but the critics of his day seemed “put off” by both his unabashedly Romantic style and his unprepossessing physical appearance. The younger American composer Ned Rorem, who took theory lessons from Sowerby, puts it this way:

“Leo Sowerby was, with John Alden Carpenter, the most distinguished composer of the Middle West ... Of my parents’ generation, a bachelor, reddish-complexioned and milky skinned, chain smoker of Fatima cigarettes, unglamorous and non-mysterious, likeable with a perpetual worried frown, overweight and wearing rimless glasses, earthy, practical, interested in others even when they were talentless; a stickler for basic training, Sowerby was the first composer I knew and the last thing a composer was supposed to resemble. He was a friendly pedagogue.”