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Published: Monday, 23 December 2024 at 10:00 AM
Leroy Anderson: master of American light music and composer of Christmas classic ‘Sleigh Ride’
Read on to discover all about Leroy Anderson, the composer of Christmas classic, ‘Sleigh Ride’…
How did Leroy Anderson come up with the idea for Sleigh Ride?
In the blazing hot July of 1946, Captain Leroy Anderson, late of Military Intelligence at the Pentagon, was stripped to the waist, digging a trench at his Connecticut cottage, trying to locate some disused pipes. A jog-trot rhythm entered his head, suitable for horses’ hooves and sleigh bells. Once back inside, he sketched out some ideas, subsequently developed and polished over the course of a year. The end product was Sleigh Ride, an orchestral piece lasting under three minutes, premiered by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra in May 1948.
This winter bonbon had no specific Christmas associations, but they gathered around it anyway as the piece speedily grew in popularity. The fame of Sleigh Ride was further boosted after its first recording in 1949 and the emergence in 1950 of a vocal version, with lyrics by Mitchell Parish that equally didn’t specify Christmas. By 2004, research had unearthed 214 Sleigh Ride recordings, a number that can only have ballooned since. And such a variety of performers! What other piece has been recorded in its time by the New York Philharmonic, the Spice Girls, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Luciano Pavarotti, Liberace, the cathedral choirs of Lincoln and Chichester, Ella Fitzgerald, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Judy Garland, the Nashville Mandolin Ensemble, the Squirrel Nut Zippers and the Tennessee Tech Trombone Choir?
Who was Leroy Anderson? Genius of the orchestral miniature…
The best known of all his compositions, Sleigh Ride was one of almost 60 orchestral miniatures written by Anderson, a tall, blue-eyed American of Scandinavian stock, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who carved a niche all his own with what he termed ‘concert music with a pop flavour’. He brought to the task the crisp craftsmanship expected of a composer who had studied at Harvard, the local university, in the late 1920s.
His main teacher was Walter Piston, recently returned from his own palette-cleansing studies in Paris. But Anderson also had a feeling for the melodies and rhythms of American popular songs, Broadway shows and jazz. Throughout his career he worked to marry popular and classical styles with skill and wit, crafting buoyantly optimistic musical jewels that surprise, delight and quickly lodge in the listener’s memory. The musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky considered him ‘one of the most completely inventive composers who ever lived’.
He was also one of the most self-critical. Chicken Reel of 1946 may have been completed in sketch form while waiting for the furniture movers, but other pieces, like Sleigh Ride, took months, sometimes years, to find their proper shape. Other pieces were simply withdrawn by the composer, notably the 19-minute Piano Concerto of 1953, his sole exploitation of a traditional classical format. But even when his ambitions were smaller, Anderson maintained strict quality control, ensuring a core output of orchestral sparklers unmatched in their verve and wit.
Leroy Anderson’s musical style
Structurally conservative
Very inventive phrase by phrase, Anderson wasn’t a structural experimenter. Thematic material proceeds in simple chunks, with the ABA pattern the most common and ABAB the runner-up. This might be a hangover from his classical Harvard education, but it’s also the result of a simple desire for immediate communication with a wide audience.
A popular touch
Popular taste also governs the genres deployed by Anderson: waltzes, marches, a tango or two, some sentimental reveries. Older dance forms like the sarabande also appear. Most of the pieces usually occupy around three minutes – perfect for fitting onto one side of the mid-20th century’s shellac discs.
Lively instrumentation
Anderson initially found fame as an orchestral arranger, and his preference for bright, kaleidoscopic textures is equally clear in his original compositions. Illustrative effects (a speciality) are usually supplied by conventional orchestral instruments. Notable exceptions include the typewriter in The Typewriter and the three varieties of sandpaper scraped during The Sandpaper Ballet.
A sense of fun
This is everywhere in Anderson, sometimes beginning with the work’s title, as in Plink, Plank, Plunk! (below) or Mother’s Whistler. Themes are varied with stylistic interruptions that take the listener by surprise, while a special joke is often employed in the final bars,
Leroy Anderson and the Boston Pops
Anderson’s interest in popular music didn’t always go down well with his Harvard superiors. Edward Burlingame Hill, the music department’s chairman, thought he had less than a ‘proper attitude’ towards his studies, a view partly governed by the time Anderson spent conducting the Harvard University Band. Turned down twice for a travelling fellowship, Anderson enrolled in 1932 in a Harvard PhD programme, studying Scandinavian languages, not music. Two years later, his thesis unfinished, he finally left academia, playing in dance bands and finding regular work as a freelance arranger.
The big step forward came in 1936, when he became associated with the Boston Pops (offshoot of the Boston Symphony Orchestra). He was asked to arrange a selection of student songs for a Harvard-themed Pops concert. The success of Harvard Fantasy spurred Arthur Fiedler, the Pops’ feisty conductor, to ask for more. Taking his time, in 1938 he offered an original piece, Jazz Pizzicato, blessed with a lazily skipping tune and plenty of charm. With this and its successor, Jazz Legato, his career finally took off. Many miniatures and orchestral arrangements followed in a lengthy Pops partnership that gave him precious access to top-level orchestral players, undaunted by the instrumental acrobatics demanded in pieces like the trumpeters’ favourite, Bugler’s Holiday.
Leroy Anderson… peak levels of popularity
The Second World War inevitably brought disruption and challenges. After enlisting in 1942, Anderson’s gift for languages led him to Military Intelligence and a stint in Iceland as translator and interpreter. But in 1945, he was back in the music business, writing, among others, The Syncopated Clock, in which steady tick-tock rhythms receive a syncopated kick from the percussion section’s wood block. The next ten years found Anderson at his peak, crafting his most popular pieces and reaching new levels of popularity, considerably helped in 1950 by a Decca recording contract as composer/conductor that allowed his music (always timed to comfortably occupy one side of a shellac disc) to reach living rooms worldwide.
One winning characteristic of this new wave of miniatures was his music’s comic engagement with phenomena of the modern age. The typewriter might have made its musical debut in 1917 in Satie’s score for the ballet Parade, but Satie’s typing pales beside the rhythmic flourish of Anderson’s The Typewriter (1950), complete with the ting of the bell that warns the typist that the paper carriage can go no further and needs to be pushed back. The Classical Jukebox, from the same year, earns its name not just from its swing-era snippets of Wagner, Delibes and Liszt, but also from the musical imitations of a 78rpm record plopping onto the turntable, the disc swiftly spinning up to speed, and the needle getting stuck in a groove.
Leroy Anderson… Latin-American rhythms
Anderson also showed a fondness for Latin-American rhythms and dances. The major showcase was Blue Tango, which proved such an unexpected hit that in 1952 it sat at the top of America’s Hit Parade for 15 weeks – a position never before reached by any instrumental item. The Girl in Satin, another tango, glided across the imagination’s dance floor with a persistently rattling castanet. In both cases, however, the tango was safely sedate and the temperature mild: Anderson, after all, hailed from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and this was Eisenhower-era America. The traditional genres of marches and waltzes weren’t ignored, though Anderson couldn’t resist giving them a humorous tweak. While Belle of the Ball spent its entire time waltzing, The Waltzing Cat found plenty of room for ‘miaow’ effects (slithering violins) and, at the end, musicians imitating yelping dogs. Note, too, a late frivolity from 1970, March of the Two Left Feet.
Leroy Anderson… high art ambitions
A journalist interviewing Anderson in May 1953 asked if he wasn’t ‘a frustrated longhair who happened to hit the popular jackpot’. Anderson blinked his blue eyes in surprise and replied: ‘All a composer can do is to write what he feels and do it as best as he can. Whether it’s popular is up to the public.’ Since he was months away from the premiere of his longhair-fringed Piano Concerto, a mixture of diluted Rachmaninov, would-be Gershwin and rather too little genuine Anderson, this was a shade disingenuous. He also talked in this period about possibly writing a ballet, a Broadway show, and a film score: all signs of a successful composer of short pieces itching to be stretched.
Brought back into circulation in 1989 by Anderson’s widow, the concerto has proved an uneven bundle, at its best when the slow movement’s wistful melody is suddenly given a Latin-American shot in the arm. That’s certainly the authentic Anderson. And for all its faults, the concerto has led a happier afterlife than his Broadway score for Goldilocks (1958), a musical set in the silent movie-making scene of the 1910s. By Anderson’s standards, one would have to rate his contributions as pleasant-minus, though the greater problem with the show seems to have been characters and a storyline that didn’t encourage emotional involvement.
Leroay Anderson… an enduring legacy
The failure of both concerto and musical seemed to give Anderson some pause, and when he returned to generating miniatures in 1962 they either looked back fondly to past hits (Clarinet Candy, the clarinet equivalent of Bugler’s Holiday) or took on a more abstract hue, occasionally with fetching results (the mildly Bachian Arietta). None of the later works, however, proved as popular as their predecessors.
Still, Anderson’s legacy remains strong. For anyone who grew up in the 1950s, his music, always on the radio, was part of childhood’s soundtrack. And its appeal remains, even in an age when some of his imitations (typewriters, gramophone needles getting stuck) need the equivalent of footnotes. For better or worse, few pay much attention now to the cut-and-dried music of his teacher Walter Piston, still less to the bookish creations of Edward Burlingame Hill. But Anderson’s music, with its ebullience, humour and ingenuity, keeps marching on in new and reissued recordings. And every Christmas brings Sleigh Ride jangling and clopping again, lifting the spirits almost 80 years after this winter landscape was first conceived, without any thought of Christmas at all.