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This Day in History: Composer Leroy Anderson was born on June 29, 1908
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The famous American composer Leroy Anderson was born on June 29, 1908 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Swedish immigrant parents who were both musical and influenced their son's interest in music.
Leroy Anderson was five years old when his mother Anna Margareta Anderson began to teach him to play piano. Anna was the organist at the Swedish Covenant Church in Cambridge, Mass. She introduced Leroy to the organ when he was eight years old. At age ten, Leroy Anderson next studied piano, music theory and harmony with Mr. Floyd Bigelow Dean at the New England Conservatory of Music.
While a student at Cambridge Latin School, Leroy studied double bass privately with Gaston Dufresne and studied organ with Henry Gideon. Leroy Anderson majored in music at Harvard where he played trombone in the Harvard University Band and double bass in the Harvard Orchestra under Nicholas Slonimsky.
Leroy Anderson became Director of the Harvard University Band which brought him to the attention of Boston Pops Orchestra conductor Arthur Fiedler. Fiedler hired Leroy Anderson as an arranger and encouraged Anderson to write original music. Starting in 1938 with Leroy Anderson's first composition "Jazz Pizzicato," Fiedler gave each of Anderson's compositions their first performance until 1950 when the majority of Anderson's pieces were first performed in recording sessions for Decca Records.
Some of Leroy Anderson's best known and most popular compositions are "Sleigh Ride", "Fiddle-Faddle", "Bugler's Holiday", "Blue Tango", "The Typewriter", "The Syncopated Clock", "A Trumpeter's Lullaby", "Serenata", and "Belle of the Ball".
"Leroy Anderson is one of the great American masters of light orchestral music. Though we have performed his works countless times over the years at the Boston Pops, his music remains forever young and fresh as the very first day on which it was composed."
"Leroy Anderson is an American original - direct, honest, personal, idiosyncratic, and free of pretension. His music is directed to, and reflective of, the American soul."
- John Williams, composer; conductor laureate, Boston Pops Orchestra