Sleigh Ride
Leroy Anderson was buried on a sunny morning in Connecticut, just as spring was threatening to give way to summer. It was 1975. The virtuosic multi-instrumentalist, polyglot, Harvard graduate, and US veteran succumbed to cancer at 66 years old. His neighbours remembered him as a quiet and modest man. The papers memorialized him as the man who brought a style of light orchestral music into every home in America.
A short few weeks later, and 700 miles west, the heat of summer had arrived in Detroit. The nurse hands a healthy baby boy to two tired-looking parents. They name him Sufjan at the recommendation of their spiritual leader. While his educational career is less illustrious, Sufjan Stevens, like Leroy Anderson before him, goes on to pick up multiple instruments, seemingly with ease.
Both are raised in a deeply spiritual context; Anderson in the Mission Church that his Swedish immigrant parents moved to and help found, Stevens in the multifaith community Subud and then at Christian school.
Both men were starting creating complex compositions while still in high school. Anderson was commissioned to write and conduct a piece for his school’s graduating class, three years running. In college, Sufjan Stevens recorded A Sun Came on a four-track recorder, blending (in his own words) “pop music, medieval instrumentation [...] tape loops, digital samples, literary vocals, manic percussion, woodwinds, sitar, amp distortion, and Arabic chants.”
Both rework Christmas carols. Both men constantly pioneer within their forms. Anderson introduced household items into the orchestra, creating percussive textures with sandpaper or a typewriter. Both continue to push themselves creatively. Anderson records operas, song cycles, and a piano concerto (which he then withdraws from performance owing to its imperfections). Sufjan creates a multimedia ode to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, creates songs for planets, zodiac signs, and serial killers, while dabbling in folk, electronica, and many other genres along the way.
Yet both will become defined by a single song. For a while, the world knew Sufjan Stevens by “Chicago.” It knew Anderson by “Sleigh Ride.”
Despite its relative complexity and innovation, these days, “Sleigh Ride” is considered a bit of a puff piece, a show tune for high school wind bands. But it’s innovative both in its harmony (with an amount of unprepared key modulations worthy of a Beyoncé song) and its instrumentation: temple blocks and slapsticks make horse and sleigh noises, with a trumpet played to sound like the whinnying animal.
The two men meet, so to speak, in a Brooklyn studio late in 2009. Sufjan Stevens had wrapped recording of The BQE. Rattling in his mind are the songs that will make up the digital anxiety of 2010’s Age of Adz. He’s choosing a Christmas song to sit alongside a delicate “Ave Maria,” the haunting “Sleigh In The Moon,” and the cheery chaos of “Holly Jolly Christmas.” He selects Anderson’s best-known tune, written some 61 years previously.
Sufjan and co play it pretty straight, with a cute guitar line and just the right amount of restless synthesizer and space-age background vocals. Until 1:41 when we’re met with a brief moment of resolution, and then a minute or so of fuzzed-up half-time drum machines and a blaring police siren.
Anderson is celebrated by a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, a centre at Harvard University, and a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And also — unwittingly, probably — by the final payoff of Sufjan’s recording. The man who introduced new timbres and found sounds into popular orchestral music, celebrated by Sufjan Steven’s ten seconds of random sound effects.
Adam Kirkup is a songwriter, musician, and pastor from Chester, UK. He writes songs about faith, doubt, the woods, and subatomic particles. This year he’s hoping for a gooseneck kettle and some nice, warm socks.
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Twitter: @adamskirkup