"Great" Composers

Back in my undergraduate days, one of my fellow students declared that, in the history of music, there were only three great composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Leroy Anderson. I never expected "Holy Ghost" of that trinity to make it into my collection. However, readers of my national site for Examiner.com probably know that I have been working my way through the second volume of the Mercury Living Presence: The Collector’s Edition. This is the first time I have encountered a collection in which all three of those composers are included. Having already found myself in the situation of having to write about an encore by Anderson (twice, as I recall), I now find that he is part of my collection!