Leroy Anderson

Leroy Anderson (June 29, 1908 – May 18, 1975) was an American composer of light orchestral music and a Broadway book writer, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Swedish parents. His mother, a church organist, gave him his earliest piano instruction, and he went on to study piano at the New England Conservatory of Music before enrolling at Harvard College in 1925. There he studied musical harmony with Walter Spalding, counterpoint with Edward Ballantine, canon and fugue with William C. Heilman, orchestration with Edward B. Hill and Walter Piston, composition with Piston, double bass with Gaston Dufresne, and organ with Henry Gideon. Anderson graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1929 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He continued at Harvard's graduate school, studying composition with Walter Piston and George Enescu, and earned a Master of Arts in Music in 1930.

Anderson subsequently pursued doctoral work at Harvard in German and Scandinavian languages, a field suited to his linguistic background: raised speaking English and Swedish, he eventually became fluent in Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese. During this period he served as organist and choir director at the East Milton Congregational Church, directed the Harvard University Band, and arranged and conducted for dance bands in the Boston area. He and his brother also performed in dance orchestras aboard Scandinavian cruise ships during the summers of 1930 and 1931.

His compositional career gained its defining partnership in 1936, when his arrangements reached Arthur Fiedler, the eighteenth conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Fiedler invited Anderson to submit original works for performance at Symphony Hall. Anderson's first composition for the ensemble, "Jazz Pizzicato," appeared in 1938, but at just over ninety seconds it was too brief for a standard three-minute 78 rpm recording. At Fiedler's suggestion, Anderson wrote a companion piece, "Jazz Legato," the same year, and the combined recording became one of his signature works.

In 1942, Anderson married Eleanor Jane Firke and enlisted in the United States Army. He was stationed in Iceland with the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps, working as a translator and interpreter and monitoring local news media. By 1945 he had been reassigned to the Pentagon as Chief of the Scandinavian Desk of Military Intelligence. Military service did not interrupt his composing: he wrote both "The Syncopated Clock" and "Promenade" in 1945. Anderson later became a reserve officer and was recalled to active duty during the Korean War.

The 1950s brought Anderson widespread commercial recognition. He wrote "Blue Tango" in 1951, and the piece reached the number one position on the Billboard charts, earned a Golden Disc, and became the first instrumental recording to sell one million copies. The Boston Pops' recording of "Sleigh Ride" — a work Anderson had begun during a heat wave in August 1946 and which was not conceived as a Christmas piece — became the first purely orchestral piece to reach number one on the Billboard Pop Music chart. Mitchell Parish added lyrics to "The Syncopated Clock," and later wrote words for "Sleigh Ride" as well. In February 1951, WCBS-TV in New York City adopted "The Syncopated Clock" as the theme for its late-night film program The Late Show, using Percy Faith's recording. From 1952 to 1961, Anderson's "Plink, Plank, Plunk!" served as the theme for the CBS panel program I've Got a Secret.

Anderson composed a Piano Concerto in C in 1953 but withdrew it, judging it to have weaknesses. The Anderson family chose to publish the work in 1988, and Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra produced its first recording; four additional recordings have since been released, including one arranged for piano and organ.

In 1958, Anderson composed the music for the Broadway musical Goldilocks, with orchestrations by Philip J. Lang. The production earned two Tony Awards but did not achieve commercial success, and Anderson did not write another musical, returning instead to orchestral miniatures. His pieces — among them "The Typewriter," "Bugler's Holiday," and "A Trumpeter's Lullaby" — have been performed by ensembles ranging from school groups to professional orchestras. Anderson's musical approach frequently employs inventive instrumental effects and incorporates unconventional sound-producing objects, including typewriters and sandpaper.

On May 18, 1972, Anderson appeared with the Boston Pops in a concert broadcast by PBS, conducting "The Typewriter" as an encore while Arthur Fiedler handled the carriage-return percussive part. The Boston Pops later incorporated audio and video from that performance into a tribute film honoring Fiedler. In 1969, Anderson was initiated as an honorary member of the Gamma Omega chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia at Indiana State University.

Anderson and his wife raised two sons and a daughter in a custom-designed house in Woodbury, Connecticut. He died of cancer in Woodbury on May 18, 1975, at the age of 66, and was buried there. His Woodbury residence has since been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Posthumous honors include induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1988 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1620 Vine Street. In 1995, Harvard University named the new headquarters of its band the Anderson Band Center in his honor.