Leroy Anderson was an American composer of light concert music. His best known pieces are "Sleigh Ride", "The Syncopated Clock" and "Blue Tango". His music captures the imagination of millions of people around the world with its memorable, optimistic melodies.

  This modest composer was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1908, to Swedish immigrant parents. He received his first music lessons from his mother, who was a church organist. At age eleven he began piano and music studies at the New England Conservatory of Music. For his high school graduation he composed, orchestrated and conducted the class song. Anderson attended Harvard University where he was the director of the Harvard University Band in 1929. He resumed the post from 1932 to 1935 when he began writing arrangements for the band. Anderson's Harvard Band arrangements are held in high regard and are still played today.

In 1936 he was asked to make an arrangement for the Boston Pops and thus came to the attention of the Boston Pops music director, Arthur Fiedler. Fiedler encouraged Anderson to bring him any original works. Anderson brought his first work, "Jazz Pizzicato", to Fiedler in 1938. Soon after that the Pops premiered it. From then on Anderson wrote a steady stream of his miniature orchestral masterworks.

   In 1947 he began writing "Sleigh Ride" during a heat wave. Completed in 1948, Sleigh Ride was not written as a Christmas piece, but rather merely described an event that took place in winter. Nonetheless, it has since become a Christmas classic.

   One of the highlights of his career came in 1972 when he made a guest appearance on Evening at Pops. This nationally televised PBS program featured The Boston Pops Orchestra and its conductor Arthur Fiedler. He said that when he first went to a Boston Pops concert while in high school he little knew then that years later "I would be first an arranger and orchestrator for the concerts and then later the composer of some of the music on the programs."

The composer died in 1975 in Woodbury, Connecticut.

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