Introduction

The indispensable bibliographical index 150 Years of Music for Saxophone catalogues ‘more than 12,000 works of “classical music” for saxophone, 1844–1994. Not included are the 3,000 symphonic or operatic works in which one or several saxophones appear in the orchestration.’ The index lists music from dozens of countries by composers of all levels of recognition and of widely diverse aesthetic approaches. These men and women have written concertos for saxophone with band and with orchestra, sonatas for saxophone and piano, unaccompanied pieces, saxophone ensembles of various sizes, and works for saxophone in unusual combination with instruments such as voice, percussion, organ, tape and synthe-sizer.

The great majority of these works were written for the alto saxophone; only in the first and the most recent decades of the instrument's existence have composers given serious consideration to the other members of the family. This chapter will attempt to trace the growth of the saxophone literature, to identify influential compositions, and to create a sense of the heritage of the performing repertoire.

Much of the core of the saxophone repertoire dates from the 1930s and provides a striking parallel with that of the clarinet. Mozart's clarinet Concerto, K.622, written in 1790, is the first masterpiece for the clarinet, an instrument created around 1700. The saxophone first appeared around 1840; Ibert's Concertino da Camera was written some ninety years later in 1935, and is a comparable landmark in the history of the saxophone literature. Each composition has important predecessors, but the saxophone repertoire had an important advantage: Adolphe Sax.