Musical Performance

The saxophone has to be treated as a family of seven instruments of different sizes, each one covering 4 octaves and all seven a compass of 51 octaves. Saxophones look like outsize metal tobacco pipes supported by neck slings, apart from the sopranos which are shorter, parabolic cones. All have a single reed, clarinet-type mouthpiece. Classed as woodwinds, though made of brass, their part is written in a treble clef on a stave beneath the clarinets.

Repertoire

The saxophone has never become a regular member of the orchestra, and at first only the French scored for it, among them Delibes, SaintSaens, d’Indy and Bizet. The first, in the 1840s, was Johann Georg Kastner, opera composer and author of the first important French treatise on instrumentation (whose son, incidentally, invented the pyrophone, a weird device which produced singing flames).

In the 20th century, however, partly as a result of its adoption by military bands, the saxophone has become an instrument of primary importance in popular music, especially jazz. Such American players as Johnny Hodges, Lester Young and Charlie Parker on alto, and Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins on tenor, to name just a few, established the saxophone securely as a means of intensely personal self-expression, relying particularly on its resemblance to the sound of the human voice. It is not surprising, therefore, that 20th century composers have found the occasional appropriate use for it, especially the French, who have been influenced by jazz. Debussy wrote a rhapsody for saxophone and piano which has been orchestrated; Ravel used it in his Bolero, and in his masterful orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures al an Exhibition, where he assigned it the role of the troubadour singing to gain entrance to ‘The Old Castle’. The Germans ignored the instrument until Richard Strauss introduced a quartet into his Symphonia Domestics. Curiously, Vaughan Williams, who was not a great orchestrator and reportedly sought advice on the subject, not only wrote a concerto for tuba and a romance for the harmonica, but also used a saxophone in his ballet job. And there is an alto saxophone part in the Dies Irae of Britten’s Sinfoania la Requiem, which was written in 1940 during the Second World War, the subject of the work.

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