Leo Sowerby
- Author: Sargent, Joseph
In academic prose, Joseph Sargent lays out the career clearly enough, and gives sustained analysis to several works…Between the dry sentences, tiny details emerge that make you want to know...
Leo Sowerby
- Author: Sargent, Joseph
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In academic prose, Joseph Sargent lays out the career clearly enough, and gives sustained analysis to several works…Between the dry sentences, tiny details emerge that make you want to know...
About
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, Sowerby’s 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 Sargent’s biography offers the first focused study of Sowerby’s life and work against the backdrop of the composer’s place in American music. As Sargent shows, Sowerby’s present-day marginalization as a composer relates less to the quality of his work than the fact that today’s historiographical practices and canon-building activities minimize modern church music. Sargent’s re-evaluation draws on a wide range of perspectives and composer’s music and writings to enrich detailed analyses of musical works and a career-spanning consideration of Sowerby’s musical language and aesthetic priorities.
Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Sowerby in American History
- The Emerging Americanist (1895–1918)
- Home and Away: European Travels, American Concert Success (1919–27)
- The Church Ascendant: Chicago and a More “Balanced” Composer (1927–40)
- Secular Decline, Sacred Rise (1940–62)
- Washington and the College of Church Musicians (1962–68)
- Epilogue: Forgetting and Remembering
- Notes
- Suggested Listening
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Awards and reviews
In academic prose, Joseph Sargent lays out the career clearly enough, and gives sustained analysis to several works…Between the dry sentences, tiny details emerge that make you want to know much more about this shy, red-haired, discreetly gay man who loved steaks, Brussels sprouts and martinis.
