Leo Rich Lewis

Leo Rich Lewis (1865-1945) was an American composer and music educator, born in Woodstock, Vermont. He graduated from Tufts College in 1887, took further degrees at Harvard, and returned to Tufts in 1892 as Fletcher Professor of Music, chairing the music department there until his death in 1945. He composed the Tufts alma mater, taught the composer Alan Hovhaness, and edited collections of sacred music, including the hymnbook Church Harmonies New and Old (1895). A dormitory at Tufts is named in his honor.

The revision of the old Church Harmonies for a new generation: 'a book of spiritual song for Christian worshippers,' edited with the musical assistance of Charles R. Tenney and Leo Rich Lewis. It mixes the denomination's inherited hymnody with the newer gospel-song and Anglican-chant styles of the 1890s, and was the last major hymnal the Universalist Publishing House produced in the nineteenth century.

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The old Gloria Patri responses book (1866, also in this collection) as revised for a new century by Elmer Hewitt Capen, president of Tufts College, with the music edited by Leo Rich Lewis, Tufts's professor of music — evidence that the Universalist liturgical tradition, though always a minority taste, persisted into the twentieth century.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)