The Three-Minute While

Which living composer is most often played by U.S. symphonies? Most concertgoers would guess Stravinsky, and they would be right. Not far behind, according to a survey by Broadcast Music Inc., are some other easily predictable names--Copland. Hindemith, Barber. But U.S. concertgoers are also exposed, the survey shows, to massive doses of a composer whose music they may be surprised to find on a concert program. He is Connecticut's Leroy Anderson.

Anderson's music has infiltrated the public ear most persuasively through television's Late Show, its theme music is from a mesmeric Anderson work known as Syncopated Clock ("Everybody does tick-tock pieces, but nobody ever gave them a syncopated twist before"). Anderson, 53, writes what he calls "concert music with a pop quality"--compositions that rely heavily on acoustical effects and rarely run longer than three minutes. Most popular Anderson concert piece last season was Sleigh Ride, a jog-trotting exercise complete with sleigh bells (jingled by a percussionist) the crack of a whip (two hinged pieces of wood slapped together) and the sound of a whinnying horse (a trumpet with valves half closed).

A Harvard graduate, Composer Anderson started out with more classical ambitions, built his reputation as a "Tin Pan longhair" only after a nine-year stretch writing arrangements for the Boston Pops Orchestra. He turns out about three of his capsule compositions each year, numbers such as Blue Tango, Trumpeter's Lullaby, Sand Paper Ballet. (He also wrote the music for one Broadway musical--Goldilocks.) His method of composition is as surprising as his success: "There's nothing like getting a good title," says he, "and working backwards."

Along with Anderson, the general run of "contemporary" (post-1900) composers come off remarkably well in the B.M.I. survey; they wrote almost two-thirds of the works played by U.S. orchestras last season. Serge Prokofiev was the most-played contemporary, and Stravinsky's Firebird Suite was the most-played contemporary composition. But that still left Serge, Igor and Leroy Anderson several long leagues behind the perennial alltime favorite: Ludwig van Beethoven. Music lovers could take some comfort from the fact that last season Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto was played just 40.3 times as often as Anderson's Plink Plank Plunk.

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