Background
Rowlands was born to Welsh parents (his father was a Congregationalist missionary) in Madagascar on 17 September 1891 and spent the first seven years of his life there before returning to be educated in schools in London and Wales.
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Leo Rowlands
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Education
In 1912 he graduated in music from the University of Wales, Cardiff, going on to the Royal Academy of Music where he studied the piano, composition and singing with Frederick Corder and York Bowen and took his doctorate in music in 1914.
Career
He was captured in Neuve Chapelle in March 1918 and remained a prisoner until the end of the war. He spent the 1930s-1940s at the Friary of Street Francis, Providence, Rhode Island, where he established the Gregorian School of Music and the Catholic Choral Society of Providence in 1935 as well as a reputation as a lecturer and recitalist. He returned to England in 1952 where he was introduced to the poet Olive Fraser, some of whose verse he is said to have set to music for voice and piano.
He died at the Franciscan House in Crawley, West Sussex, in 1967.
