San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The underrated music of Leroy Anderson.
If Norman Rockwell has a counterpart in the world of orchestral music, it’s the composer Leroy Anderson. Like Rockwell, Anderson found his niche in an underappreciated arena of American popular culture, and infused it with a degree of vibrancy and inventive wit that it rarely enjoyed before or after.
Selfprofessed sophisticates like to condescend to the work of both men, and they do so at their peril.
Anderson, who died in 1975 at 66, did just one thing, and he did it surpassingly well. He wrote short orchestral entertainments, mostly for Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, that generally last no more than three or four minutes but get into a listener’s memory and lodge there permanently.
Which is to say that even if you don’t know Anderson’s name, there’s a good chance that some of his melodies are living undetected in your brain. Don’t believe me? Nip over to YouTube or Spotify and crank up “Sleigh Ride” or “The Syncopated Clock” and see if you don’t have a little starburst of recognition.
This is a good time to celebrate Anderson’s quirky genius, which is circumscribed but genuine. Beginning on Tuesday, Feb. 11, his music returns to the War Memorial Opera House with the San Francisco Ballet’s revival of Mark Morris’ ebullient “Sandpaper Ballet.”
I’ll leave the balletic aspect of this work to other critics, other than to point out that Morris’ eclectic and unerring musical taste has once again led him to detect theatrical possibilities where others might not. With their buoyant rhythms and crisp instrumental profiles, Anderson’s orchestral baubles turn out to be just waiting for a choreographic touch.
“Sandpaper Ballet” features no fewer than 11 of them – not only the two mentioned above, but other gems as well including “The Typewriter,” “FiddleFaddle” and the matched musical bookends of “Jazz Pizzicato” and “Jazz Legato.” (Missing, curiously, is “Sandpaper Ballet” itself, from which Morris takes his title.)
Because they’re so short, Anderson’s pieces often tend to cluster in groups, as they’re doing here. Yet each one is so particular, so distinctive, that — like Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers — they create an entire world in just a few deft creative strokes.
Listen, for example, to the imaginative breadth of “The Typewriter,” one of Anderson’s bestknown creations. The foundational idea is simple enough: The piece uses the rapid clattering of typewriter keys, along with the fwoop of the carriage return and its premonitory warning bell, as foregrounded percussion instruments. (If you’re not sure what a carriage return is, ask your granddad.)
That alone would have been enough to carry a onejoke entertainment for a quick minute and a half. But Anderson fits out the notion with far more sophistication and variety than he really had to — a tune that starts and stops at intervals that get increasingly unpredictable, a middle section that harks back to the main theme with just a whisper of complicity, and a delightful climax that sunders the melody into fragments.
You’d still enjoy the basic idea without all of that, but you wouldn’t laugh as hard or hum along as contentedly.
This is Anderson’s M.O. again and again. Many of his pieces have an underlying premise or gag that you can put your finger on directly. “Sandpaper Ballet” uses, well, sandpaper as a solo instrument. “The Waltzing Cat” depicts just what it says, with languorous, fluid string phrases and a corny but delicious final punch line that I’m not going to give away here. “Bugler’s Holiday” (my personal favorite) gives the trumpet section of the orchestra a communal workout at top speed.
Yet these pieces always transcend their premises through the remarkable dexterity of Anderson’s orchestral skill and the suavity of his melodic vein. And when Anderson isn’t cracking wise — as in “The Girl in Satin” or “Balladette,” both of which feature in “Sandpaper Ballet” — he writes a nearperfect pop melody, with a silky orchestral setting that will melt your heart.
The problem with Anderson’s little pieces is that it’s hard to find a natural setting for them. They don’t fit comfortably en masse in the concert hall (although they’re a perfect and untapped trove for orchestral encores). They fit in too well in shopping malls, where their populist charm can obscure their richer musical virtues.
Yet even though this genre feels somewhat isolated on the American musical landscape, it has an obvious European forebear in the Viennese waltzes and polkas churned out by the Strauss family and other composers of their ilk — flavorful, formulaic and deceptively sophisticated bonbons that are studded with sentimental tunes and quickhit jokes.
Those pieces also don’t do well in the concert hall, as a recent San Francisco Symphony program demonstrated — and the reason is because they were made to be danced to. Perhaps Morris, in fitting Anderson’s music with his own dances, has found it the natural home it’s been wanting all along.