It’s easy to think, as many people have, that anyone who would compose two to three minute tunes like Fiddle Faddle and the Waltzing Cat could hardly be a serious classical composer, but they would be wrong. Leroy Anderson was a very serious composer indeed. He was an extraordinarily erudite, talented man who spoke 10 languages fluently and was equally at home playing the piano, the organ, the trombone, the cello and the double bass.

Despite his ability with language he was, in fact, not very talkative. He claimed that he expressed himself best in his music, something which he had done since the age of 12 when he penned his first composition, a minuet for string quartet. The result earned him a scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music.

The son of Swedish immigrants to America, he was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1908, was schooled at the local high school, just down the road from Harvard University. He took piano lessons from his mother from the age of five and when he was a teenager his father bought him a trombone so that he would have to play in the front row of the Harvard University band which Leroy had joined, making sure that everyone would see his son.

He also played trombone in the school orchestra until one day when the orchestra’s conductor realised that he was short a double bass player for a concert. He persuaded Leroy to take the instrument home for the weekend to practice. Come the Monday he returned to school and played the bass so well that everyone thought he’d been playing it for years.

When he eventually moved on to Harvard University he started to study composition seriously while at the same time working towards a PhD in Scandinavian languages. As a graduate he got offered a good job teaching German in a private school in Pennsylvania, but luckily Arthur Fiedler, then conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, talked him out of it. Luckily because then Fiedler invited him to write for the Pops orchestra, and so Anderson’s career as a composer was really born.

During the 1930s Anderson worked as an arranger for popular dance orchestras, but when war broke out he was drafted into the US Army which made use of his linguistic abilities by making him a translator and interpreter in the Counter Intelligence Corps. Because he could speak Icelandic, he was sent to Reykjavic where he didn’t have much opportunity for music, but in 1943 he was assigned to the Pentagon, from where he began again sending manuscripts to Arthur Fiedler.

After the war he formed a string quartet in which he played the cello and led the ensemble in performances of classical standards. But it was really what he liked to call “orchestral miniatures” which excited him and from this time he gave us such enduring small classics as the Syncopated Clock, Fiddle Faddle and of course The Typewriter. He did experiment however with the longer form and his most ambitious work was his Concerto in C major for piano and orchestra in three movements. It was premiered in 1953 in Chicago with Anderson as conductor and Eugene List as the pianist. After somewhat mixed reviews, Anderson withdrew the work, claiming that it needed to be improved. He never got round to making those improvements and the work wasn’t played again until after his death when the family released it in 1988. Since then it has been recorded by numerous pianists and orchestras, including our own Simon Tedeschi with the Melbourne Symphony.

It was inevitable I suppose that at some stage he was to get involved with musical theatre and 1958 saw the opening of Goldilocks in New York. Like many musicals of the time, the story was pretty silly, but the critics praised Anderson’s score and the musical ran for 161 performances.

The Boston Pops Orchestra paid tribute to Anderson in 1972 in a televised concert that was broadcast nationwide, an evening which he said was “the most important evening of my life.” Now suffering from lung cancer, he continued to compose and conduct throughout North America until his death 50 years ago on May 18th, 1975 at the age of 67.

Listen to Michael Morton-Evans ‘s Celebrating Leroy Anderson program on Monday 19 May from 1pm to 2.30pm. 

-Michael Morton-Evans