Leroy Anderson

He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording at 1620 Vine Street in Hollywood, California.

In 1925 Anderson entered Harvard University, where 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 Walter Piston and double bass with Gaston Dufresne. He also studied organ with Henry Gideon.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, Magna cum laude in 1929 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In Harvard University Graduate School, he studied composition with Walter Piston and Georges Enescu and received a Master of Arts in Music in 1930.

Leroy Anderson was Director of the Harvard University Band through circa 1933, entertaining Class of '37 undergrads such as 'Franklin Roosevelt Jr.' & "Bill Haskell", dad of L.A. actor-narrator, Christopher Haskell.

As a graduate student Leroy became Director of the Harvard University Band and wrote numerous clever arrangements for the band that brought him to the attention of Arthur Fiedler, Director of the Boston Pops Orchestra. His first arrangement for Fiedler in 1936 was a medley of Harvard songs - Harvard Fantasy.

In 1938 the Boston Pops performed his first composition, Jazz Pizzicato. It was an immediate hit. Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra were the first to perform and record many of his compositions.

At the start of World War II Leroy was drafted as a private into the U.S. Army, which made use of his fluency in languages. He married Eleanor Jane Firke before shipping off to Iceland where he served as a translator and interpreter in the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps, beginning in 1942. While there he wrote an Icelandic Grammar for the U.S. Army.

Famous peaces of Anderson were beside "Blue Tango" probably "Sleigh Ride" and "The Syncopated Clock." "Sleigh Ride" was not written as a Christmas piece, but as a work that describes a winter event. Anderson started the work during a heat wave in August 1946. The Boston Pops' recording of it was the first pure orchestral piece to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Pop Music chart.

New Haven Register' music critic Gordon Armstrong described Anderson in 1947 as being a "triple threat in music - arranger, composer, conductor.".

Over the years, Leroy's pieces have been employed as themes in both radio and television. In the early 1950's, CBS-TV Channel 2 in NYC chose The Syncopated Clock as the theme for its program of movies called"The Late Show". CBS used it for more than 25 years. Plink, Plank, Plunk! was known to many in the '50's as the theme for the TV game show "I've Got a Secret", and The Typewriter has become a favorite for a variety of radio news productions.

In 1951 Anderson wrote his first hit, "Blue Tango," earning a Golden Disc and the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts. "Blue Tango" was the first instrumental recording ever to sell one million copies.

In 1958, Anderson composed the music for the Broadway show Goldilocks with orchestrations by Philip J. Lang. Even though it earned two Tony awards, Goldilocks did not achieve commercial success. Anderson never wrote another musical, preferring instead to continue writing orchestral miniatures.

Anderson's musical style employs creative instrumental effects and occasionally makes use of sound-generating items such as typewriters and sandpaper. (Krzysztof Penderecki also used a typewriter in his orchestral work "Fluorescences" (1961-62), but with a decidedly less humorous effect.).

His "Forgotten Dreams" was for many years in the 1970s the closing theme of Friday editions of New York station WABC-TV's Eyewitness News (1968).

Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1988.

His "Syncopated Clock" was the theme song for "The Late (and Late, Late) Show(s)", WCBS-TV's movie programs that usually ran all through the New York night into early morning, this before the advent of late-night original programming, such as Late Show with David Letterman (1993). Another Anderson song, "The Phantom Regiment", was the theme song for the "Four O'Clock Movie" that was shown weekdays on another New York station in the early 60s.

In 1995 the new headquarters of the Harvard University Band was named the Anderson Band Center in honor of Leroy Anderson.

In 2006, one of his piano works, "Forgotten Dreams", written in 1954, became the background for a British TV advertisement for mobile phone company '3'. Previously, Los Angeles station KABC-TV used the song as its sign-off theme at the end of broadcast days in the 1980s, and Mantovani's recording of the song had been the closing theme for WABC-TV's Eyewitness News for much of the 1970s.

The Leroy Anderson House, the former home of Leroy Anderson in Woodbury, Connecticut, was named by the National Park Service to the National Register of Historic Places in December 2012.

The Town of Woodbury designated the Leroy Anderson House as a historic house museum in April 2018.