Leroy Anderson

Leroy Anderson was America’s prime purveyor of light music in the middle of the 20th century, blessed with an uncanny ability to paint vivid musical pictures. Born in 1908, he experienced a heyday that coincided with the growing ubiquity of radio, the rise of television and a vogue for “pops” concerts of undemanding orchestral music; by the mid-1950s, a US survey found that he was the most-performed American composer. He specialised in short works that suggested a mood or an image in just a few minutes through an ear for instrumental sonority, a gift for melody and a gentle, unassuming wit. All this was allied with a cast-iron technique, the result of study at Harvard with Walter Piston and George Enescu, and his time spent honing his role as an orchestrator for Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. He composed a single piano concerto (1953) and a musical, Goldilocks (1958), but it is the evocatively titled miniatures such as “The Typewriter” (1950), “The Sandpaper Ballet” (1954) and, above all, the instantly recognisable Sleigh Ride (1948) that ensured his fame beyond his death in 1975.