Sowerby in New York

Impressed though New Yorkers may be with the growth of musical appreciation all over the U. S., they still refuse to be convinced by musical verdicts other than their own. For 15 years Chicago has been aware of Leo Sowerby, the redhaired, bespectacled young man who on Sundays sits soberly gowned in the organ loft at St. James's Cathedral. Chicago recognizes him as one of the most important U. S. composers. But New Yorkers who went to last week's Philadelphia Orchestra concert were not deeply impressed by the fact that Conductor Eugene Ormandy had chosen to play Sowerby's Prairie. Listeners for whom most modern music is synonymous with unfathomable din were asked to imagine themselves alone in an Illinois cornfield far away from railways, motorcars, telephones and radios.

Composer Sowerby's Prairie, like Carl Sandburg's poem which inspired it, aptly describes the hush which enwraps the flat midwestern farmlands, the far-away burr of threshing machines, the climactic glow of a sudden sunset and the grey, momentous calm which follows. A few carping critics were inclined to credit Poet Sandburg with most of the inspiration but the sharpness of Sowerby's musical perceptions, developed now into a unanimously praised skill at orchestration, showed itself long before Chicago's red-headed organist had heard of Poet Sandburg. He was six years old, living in Grand Rapids where his father worked in the postoffice, when he showed an unusual talent for playing the piano. During the War, in spite of being blind in one eye, he was drafted for military service, set to playing the saxophone and the clarinet in a regimental band. Even then, at 22, Leo Sowerby was writing ambitious orchestral music. Conductor Frederick Stock invited him to attend the Chicago Symphony's performance of his Set of Four. He got leave to go but when he returned to the regiment the bandmaster reprimanded him roundly, told him he knew nothing about music anyhow. Later in France after he had done time washing dishes, peeling potatoes and cleaning latrines, he had the bandmaster's job.

After the War, Leo Sowerby went again to Europe, the first composer to be awarded a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. In Rome his colleagues twitted him for wearing suits that were a little too natty, for ties that never quite went with his vivid shirts, for preferring burned beefsteak to the Italian delicacies that the other Prix de Rome students were learning to fancy, for sitting down methodically eight hours a day to write music which might or might not go into the wastebasket.

In Chicago Leo Sowerby leads the same simple, methodical life. He likes to be an organist because it gives him time to compose, to develop his interest in old ecclesiastical music. He teaches at the American Conservatory of Music, where he put in his own first serious study. Eastern audiences are better acquainted with the music of Howard Hanson. Composer Sowerby's Rochester friend, but discriminating midwesterners regard Sowerby as every bit Hanson's equal, an opinion which many a New Yorker heartily indorsed last week after listening to Prairie.

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