Introduction

Leo Sowerby’s music has experienced a complicated reception history. His organ and choral repertory, for which he remains best known, is widely appreciated for its harmonic complexity and technical demands. His concert music, meanwhile, has largely fallen out of fashion, despite Sowerby’s considerable visibility during much of his own lifetime. These sharp reception differences have led some to label Sowerby a sacred specialist, but in fact Sowerby carefully balanced church and concert music across his life. Labels of any kind are in fact problematic, especially because Sowerby himself never aligned himself with particular stylistic markers or compositional schools of thought.