Relaxing with cordial and cigar after a leisurely dinner with his wife at Kaysey's he might - if the Phi Beta Kappa key caught the light just right pass for a Yale professor waiting to join the crowd that would soon funnel across the street to another tryout at the Schubert Theater.

Nothing the man does in his private life is consciously conspicuous. It is in his work, though, that the man commands the attention he seems to deliberately avoid as a person. But standing head-and -shoulders above the crowd as a composer and conductor is Woodbury's Leroy Anderson.

The words that best describe his success might well be just the titles of his best-known works: "Blue Tango," "Sleigh Ride," "Bugler's Holiday," "Plink, Plank, Plunk!" are among them. Then there are "Syncopated Clock," "The Typewriter" and "Sandpaper Ballet" if you want more.

None of these is "classical," yet each is a classic. Leroy Anderson doesn't really write "popular" music, either, yet his works have achieved immense popularity. His compositions have been described by one musicologist as lying "in that no-man's land between the longhair and the short ... miraculously made pleasing to both."

Another commentator, unable to find a convenient label - or recognizing the fact that the compositions fall in no established category but ignore standard patterns and restricts - came up with the phrase that most aptly summarizes their status: "Leroy Anderson Music."

"Leroy Anderson Music" began (or, at least, was first recognized) with a composition for the Boston Pops

Orchestra when he was its orchestrator and arranger. "Arthur Fiedler wanted new, light compositions," Anderson has said. "New writers were either writing serious music or very commercial songs."

The result was Anderson's "Jazz Pizzicato," which he wrote because, well, "no one had ever written a pizzicato for jazz before." It established his independence of style. "You develop style yourself; teachers provide you with technique," he commented, pointing out that in his development "first it was Mozart, then there was Brahms, then came Anderson."

(It should be pointed out that this is not an interview with Leroy Anderson. It is a compendium of friendship with him ... of respect for his music... of remembered conversations... casually accumulated biography. It is an appreciation.)

A resident of Woodbury for the past 20 years - you'll find no map here leading to his already busy home - Leroy Anderson was born 61 years ago in Cambridge, Mass., where he received an education that -in longevity, at least - should make most "professional Harvards" wilt: from kindergarten through graduate school he attended classes on the same street, Broadway, in Cambridge.

A degree (magna cum laude) in music and the Phi Beta Kappa Key came in 1929. So did an Elkan Naumberg Fellowship to continue his musical education at Harvard, so he remained to add organ and double bass to his piano-predicated background and to conduct the university band. The master's in music wasn't enough, for an intended educator, so he stayed in Cambridge to study Germanic languages "but I was a Ph.D. dropout after four years."

While pursuing linguistics (which came in handy during his four-year stint with Military Intelligence during World War 11), Anderson was a church organist and choirmaster and taught music at Radcliffe College until, in 1935, he decided to make music his career and began his association with the Boston Pops and Arthur Fiedler an affiliation that is partially responsible for his residency in Woodbury.

His earlier career required Anderson's frequent presence in New York. Now he visits his publisher's office in the city only once a week, finds the Berkshire foothills also convenient to his beloved Boston Pops and as a confirmed, but not stereotyped, New England Yankee, "just happened to like this part of the country" for himself, his wife and their four children.

None of the children has shown any inclination toward a musical career, he has remarked, but "all children are musical. My wife is, now, but she wasn't when we were married. I guess you just have to be in a house like ours." (The house, incidentally, is spacious and modern and perched atop a grassy hill. Enough for clues.)

It is here that Leroy Anderson composes, envisioning the music in his mind. "If you use your fingers at the piano you're likely to fall into established patterns. And I don't write anything down -until it's almost finished - because that 'fixes' it and once it's on paper it's difficult to change."

Writing music (never lyrics) like "Blue Tango" and "Syncopated Clock" is far from the limit of Leroy Anderson's ability - or experience. He has ventured from Cambridge's Broadway to Manhattan's Broadway as composer of the Walter and Jean Keff musical, "Goldilocks," whose score produced the "Lady in Waiting" ballet and "Pyramid Dance," a brilliant satire of silent movie-making.

Although much of the music of Leroy Anderson is touched with humor, sometimes subtle and often rollicking, "The First Day of Spring," is sheer poetry. He has been acclaimed for "A Christmas Festival," a magnificent blend of six centuries of traditional music, but he has also written original sacred compositions. I am not at all that familiar with his "Scottish Suite" but there is no single piece of music that represents the essence of a people that Anderson's "Irish Suite," traditional tunes woven into a rich tapestry of history and emotion, threads of love and life that seemed to be waiting for someone to put them in order.