{"id":42314,"date":"2014-07-25T09:46:18","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T16:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bassic-sax.info\/blog\/?p=42314"},"modified":"2024-06-14T11:24:46","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T18:24:46","slug":"history-of-the-saxophone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bassic-sax.info\/blog\/2014\/history-of-the-saxophone\/","title":{"rendered":"History Of The Saxophone"},"content":{"rendered":"

The history of the saxophone \u2013 at least the way one newspaper told it<\/h2>\n

It was only a few weeks ago, on June 5<\/a>, that I wrote a story about a 1939 newspaper article in which the reporter noted that the saxophone was a difficult instrument to play well. If you’ve seen any of the previous historical saxophone articles<\/a> that I’ve written about, you know that that article from the Ottawa Citizen<\/em> was rather unusual in its support of our instrument.<\/p>\n

Then this morning I just so happened to come across another article in which the author also recognized the saxophone’s level of difficulty. And just like the Ottawa Citizen<\/em> article, the author didn’t want to burn sax players at the stake either. Progress!<\/p>\n

By the late 1930s\/early 1940s the saxophone’s rep was being rehabilitated and it was on its way back to social acceptability. Check out the following article titled, History of the Saxophone<\/em>, from a 1940 edition of the Hearld-Journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Harold-Journal-May-5,-1940,<\/a><\/p>\n

Source: The Hearold-Journal Young Folk’s Page<\/em>, May 5, 1940<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

OK, so the author got a few of the facts wrong. I don’t remember reading anywhere before that the design of the saxophone was “by accident”. All the sources that I have seen in my 30+ years reading about saxophones, indicate that our horn was invented when Adolphe Sax went about deliberately looking for ways to improve on the bass clarinet.<\/p>\n

Yes, the ophieleide<\/a> was likely a source of inspiration for Adolphe Sax, but to say the saxophone was an accidental discovery really sells the Belgian musical instrument inventor short. He was a genius when it came to instrument design, sadly however, that did not translate into a financial windfall for him. Multiple lawsuits were contributing factors to the man dying with very little money to his name.<\/p>\n

As far as the rest of the history of the saxophone presented in the 1940 article by John Glominski, the second column is more accurate.<\/p>\n

The city of Dinant (Adolphe Sax’s Belgian hometown), states on their website<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In his book “The Saxophone” in 1955, Marcel Perrin, professor at the Algiers Conservatory, and the founder of a quartet, took the view that “the literature on the saxophone can in fact be divided into three stages:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n