He began his professional music career playing bass clarinet for the
New Haven Symphony Orchestra while attending Yale College. After graduating from Yale, he joined the
New Hampshire Army National Guard and was in Battery D,
197th Coast Artillery Regiment (Antiaircraft) of the
Coast Artillery Corps, where he became a sergeant. He then enlisted as an infantry sergeant on February 24, 1941, in
New Haven, Connecticut. His enlistment papers give his height as six foot two and his weight as 165 and give his specialty as a musician or band leader. He served in the
U.S. Army Air Forces throughout World War II and became a master sergeant. While Leyden was serving as an Army Air Forces
master sergeant in
Atlantic City, and rehearsing music,
Glenn Miller heard Leyden perform. Miller said to him, "For a Yale man, you don't play bad tenor". Miller called on Leyden in September 1943 to conduct the
Moss Hart Army Air Forces spectacular "Winged Victory". This was a big musical play in
Broadway's
Shubert Theatre with an all service band. The show started in November 1943. Leyden next requested the opportunity to arrange for Glenn Miller, and was accepted and served as one of three arrangers for Miller's Army Air Forces Orchestra. His first arrangement for the band was "Now I Know". Sometimes, Leyden would write more complexity into the score than was desirable. Miller told him once "Hey Norm, it was a nice try. But remember it ain't what you write, it's what you ''don't'' write". In 1943, Leyden composed the theme music for the wartime radio series "
I Sustain the Wings" with Glenn Miller,
Chummy MacGregor, and Bill Meyers. It ran from 1943 to 1944. One of the arrangements he was most proud of was that of "Long Ago and Far Away." Leyden also arranged for the reorganized
Glenn Miller Orchestra of
Tex Beneke. He is among those musicians honored by a memorial American Holly tree dedicated to that organization at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia on December 15, 1994. Listed as Dr. Norman Fowler Leyden, Ph.D., he is in the Glenn Miller Hall of Fame, Glenn Miller Archives, American Music Research Center, University of Colorado Boulder. In August 2000, he led the Air Force Falconaires of the
Air Force Band of the Rockies in a
PBS television special, "Glenn Miller's Last Flight". Between 1956 and 1959, he was musical director for
Arthur Godfrey's radio program. He also worked as musical director on
The $64,000 Question Leyden also served as the music director of the
Seattle Symphony Pops for eighteen seasons, and as conductor of the
Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's Prairie Pops for eight seasons. He also conducted the
Chappaqua Orchestra as its second music director before moving to the
West Coast. He worked with Portland-based band
Pink Martini and can be heard performing a clarinet solo on the title track of the band's second album,
Hang On Little Tomato. Leyden's personal music score library, housed in an airy basement studio, included over 1,200 symphonic arrangements and 300 big band works. He became one of just two classical musicians to be inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame in 2008. He performed with Pink Martini in Seattle in August 2012, and on July 19, 2013, he debuted at the
Hollywood Bowl, again with Pink Martini. Leyden died on July 23, 2014, of an unspecified cause. On August 28, 2014, the Oregon Symphony performed a memorial concert in Leyden's honor at
Tom McCall Waterfront Park in Portland. ==Awards==