Saxophone teaching and learning comprise a diverse field. Every student is an individual, as is every teacher; study can be at any level from elementary to conservatoire or university; it can take place in one-to-one or group situations; and of course there are many different musical idioms to explore using the saxophone. It is difficult to imagine a ‘complete’ guide to teaching and learning the saxophone. However, I shall try to offer at least a personal view of what I consider to be some of the essential factors, common threads running through good teaching and learning at all levels.

Although there are a very few exceptional saxophonists who are truly self-taught, learning usually occurs through a process of interaction between students, teachers and institutions. The goals of this learning process are: the awakening and refining of the latent talent and musical imagination which is there to a greater or lesser extent in all saxophone students; the equipping of the student with the skills, techniques, judgement and experiences to draw upon in giving the imagination a voice, making communicative and accurate performances. These performances may be made by playing from written music, from memory or by ear, in as many of the different styles of music available to saxophonists as possible or desired.

Music is a complicated subject. It has physical, emotional and intellectual components, which all need to be addressed. There is a long continuum of levels of achievement; through the learning process the effort of the student, guided by the teacher possibly in the environment of an institution, is directed towards gradually improving the communicative range and technical standard of their playing.

The nineteenth century

In 1983, it was estimated that the composers of more than 2000 operas, ballets and symphonic works had by then included parts for one or more saxophones. Only a very small number of these works were written between 1850 and 1900. I am sure that Adolphe Sax the designer, manufacturer, player and publisher was disappointed that his family of instruments had not found a much more secure place in the affections of classical composers by the turn of the century.

The eulogies heaped upon Sax and his inventions by Hector Berlioz, even before the patent was secured in 1846, should have helped to popularise them. It is all the more strange that Berlioz only scored one piece including saxophone, an arrangement for six instruments, all designed or perfected by Sax, of one of his own vocal works, Chant sacré (arr. 1844). Few composers used saxophones in the orchestra in the nineteenth century. Their works are well known and frequently quoted; Ambroise Thomas in his operas Hamlet (1868) (alto and baritone) and Françoise de Rimini (1882), Bizet in L'Arlésienne (1872), Delibes in the ballet Sylvia (1876), and Massenet in Hérodiade (1877) and Werther (1892) all wrote effective and beautiful solos. These are mostly in the form of brief set pieces, although the saxophone plays throughout the whole opera Werther. Hérodiade requires an alto and a tenor. César Franck scored for a complete quartet (SATB) in his rarely performed opera Hulda (1882–5).

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.

The saxophone quartet as a medium is generally thought to have dated from 1928, although earlier works were written for the combination by Jean-Baptiste Singelée (1812–75), including Allegro de Concert (AATB), Quatuor en 4 Parties (SATB) and Grand Quatuor Concertant en 3 Parties (SATB). Another early introduction of the ensemble was by Edouard Lefèbre (1834–1911). He was born in Holland of French parents and was a soloist with the New York based Gilmore band from 1873. The band featured a saxophone quartet in 1878, consisting of Lefèbre, Walrabe, Steckelberg and Schultz. In 1905, Lefèbre established his own quartet, which toured the USA, Alaska, Europe and the Philippines; their repertoire consisted of transcriptions.

The major push to establish the saxophone quartet was by the French virtuoso Marcel Mule, whose ensemble gave its first performance in La Rochelle on 2 December 1928. Le Quatuor de la Musique de la Garde Républicaine consisted of Mule (soprano), René Chaligné (alto), Hippolyte Poimboeuf (tenor) and Georges Chauvet (baritone). When Mule left La Garde in 1936, the group became known as Le Quatuor de Saxophones de Paris, and in 1951, the group took the name Marcel Mule Quartet, under which it was known until its disbandment in 1967. The original grouping remained the same until 1932, and subsequent members were Paul Romby, Fernand L'homme, Georges Charron, Marcel Josse, André Bauchy, Georges Gourdet and Guy Lacour.

With a celebrated figure such as Mule behind the artistic development of the ensemble, the grouping did actually create its own chamber music category. Because of Mule's own soloistic virtuosity and resultant contact with composers, many of these composers were forthcoming with works which formed the basis of the classic French repertoire. The nature of the ensemble was already apparent – well balanced in tessitura like a string quartet, and homogeneous in texture. Mule himself was still experimenting with the introduction of vibrato into classical saxophone performance at this time, and the quartet played for the first four years of its existence without vibrato.

In praise of saxophonists

With so-called traditional instruments, the gradual emergence of major works and an evolution of repertoire have, over time, contributed to the steady development of a particular school, usually with consistent and well-defined concepts of writing, phrasing, tone and stylistic parameters – in other words, a clear notion of what represents ‘good’ playing.

Saxophonists themselves have long faced the thorny problem of repertoire, both in terms of quality and quantity. Although orphaned for the sins of its youth, the saxophone is currently enjoying one of its most fruitful phases, with the emergence of a stability not dissimilar to that being experienced by contemporary composers.

The fifty years since the Second World War have seen both iconoclastic and purely exploratory adventures: the blind alley of total serialism and the experimental electronic ideas of the 1980s. Today's young composers see themselves as educated but not ‘academic’, knowledgeable but still inquisitive, displaying both brilliance and perception. The same applies to saxophonists. Free from any musical ‘establishment’, they have a ferocious appetite for new music and an acute sense of responsibility which will undoubtedly benefit the generations of the twenty-first century. Very rarely tied to one style, method or particular practice, their cultural base, while not actually larger than that of other instrumentalists, is often much more receptive to the most stimulating of influences. Coming from a state of ‘No Fixed Repertory’ the saxophonist can often end up trying everything, as much a polymath as his instrument is a polymorph.

Early soloists

Belgian-born Henri Wuille (1822–71) was a contemporary of Sax and one of the most ardent proponents of the new instrument. He toured widely, performing on both clarinet and saxophone to great acclaim, and his tours with impresario Louis Antoine Jullien led to his being credited as the earliest solo performer on the saxophone to play both in England and the United States.

M. Souallé (dates unknown), also Belgian, attracted the praise of Hector Berlioz after a concert in Paris in 1851, following his return from several saxophone performances in London in 1850. Souallé's artistry was proclaimed, as were the saxophone's then already obvious (at least to Berlioz) ‘incomparable and expressive qualities; the trueness and beauty of sound which can be produced when one really masters the technique are such that it can, in slow pieces, challenge the finest singers’.

Louis-Adolphe Mayeur (1837–94) earned a first prize for clarinet at the Paris Conservatoire and became an accomplished saxophonist after studies with both Klosé and Sax. He performed regularly with the Paris Opera and taught widely, contributing a tutor, the Grande Méthode, for saxophone published in 1867.

Introduction

The word ‘saxophone’ means ‘the sound of Sax’ – specifically that of Adolphe Sax. The Greek word ‘phone’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, relates in particular to vocal sounds, so we should not be surprised that the saxophone is often described as a ‘singing’ instrument. In fact, the saxophone is the most flexible and expressive of musical instruments, exceeded, perhaps, only by the human voice. The human voice, of course, is capable of sounds as varied as cheerleading and Schubert lieder; it is capable of producing guttural sounds and fine-spun eloquence, of rabble-rousing and of inspiring. The saxophone is similar in its potential to move people, both viscerally and emotionally.

As a ‘singing’ instrument, the saxophone is unmatched by its mechanical counterparts. This is often reflected in its classical repertoire, but there can be little doubt that the saxophone is the pre-eminent jazz instrument. If jazz first came from the work-shouts and the blues sung in the nineteenth century, then it is natural that a ‘singing’ instrument such as the saxophone should be well suited to jazz and popular music. What is remarkable is that the instrument took so long to be adopted by jazz musicians.

The saxophone is the invention of a single man, Adolphe Sax. Both a thinker and a doer, he had the genius to conceive a new and versatile instrument, the practical background to bring his theories to fruition and the foresight to create the mechanisms necessary to ensure that it would become an important part of the musical world.

In the vocally dominated genres of rock and pop, the saxophone has made its own special contribution, using its unique vocal attributes with conflicting personalities of sweetness and anguish. From the jump style of Louis Jordan to Courtney Pine's hip-hop, and from Junior Walker through the Baker Street phenomenon to Branford Marsalis and Kenny Gee, saxophone soloists and sections have played a crucial role. But is it rock or pop, is it rock and roll, rhythm and blues, soul, dance or funk? The transient nature of much popular music makes historical accounts sometimes vague, often conjecture, and always selective, but this short chapter will attempt to identify the general trends and most significant exponents.

The big bands of the 1930s and 1940s featured and relied on major soloists, and an important precursor of rock saxophone was to be found in the ‘Texas’ tenor sound of Arnett Cobb, Illinois Jacquet, Buddy Tate and the alto of Eddie Vinson. Stars of the Lionel Hampton and Count Basie bands in the main, their playing was renowned for its excitement and energy and was steeped in the blues. Cries and wails coloured their solos as well as riff developments; a trademark was the use of the extended upper register. Illinois Jacquet's solos with the Hampton band in Flying Home (original 1942) became legendary. ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson concentrated his career on blues playing and singing, although he was also a fine bop player, and employed the young John Coltrane in his band in 1948.

Progressive popularity

By the time of his death in 1894, Adolphe Sax had already achieved the near-impossible, though like many great inventors he would neither recognise this nor profit from it; to introduce a new musical instrument and gain acceptance of typically conservative musicians and public is a feat probably partially paralleled in the last 300 years only by Arnold Dolmetsch's re-introduction of the now common recorder. Sax's early liaison with the Garde Républicaine had assured the saxophone of a continuing presence in the French army bands, and it was this strength which eventually fed the instrument into other musical areas as the twentieth century dawned. His efforts in the classical field reaped little reward, and this was to remain a much less active arena for many years.

It is to Sax's credit that most of the acoustical and mechanical improvements to the saxophone constitute refinements which do not significantly depart from the original patents or render the early instruments unplayable today: most are developments appropriate to more modern manufacturing techniques, greater performer agility, or the optimisation of the tonal requirements of players. Since Sax's original patent rightly includes the mouthpiece, it is necessary to record a parallel development here also.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a firm and continuing role for the saxophone in the military bands of France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, with a rather recalcitrant England soon to follow. In America the Gilmore and Sousa showbands did much to extend the exposure of the instrument to the general public. However, in classical music the saxophone made only an occasional appearance, due in large part to the lack of substantial repertoire and the disinterest of orchestral musicians. Indeed the tenuous thread spun by Adolphe’s early teaching at the Paris Conservatoire seems barely discernible until reinforced by Marcel Mule and Sigurd Rascher some fifty years later.

This is Ezra Pound to his friend James Joyce, who was a singer with, by some accounts, the potential for a career as such. On the other hand, all accounts of Pound's voice are pretty well in accord with his own jocular assessment - raucous, nasal, a scratchy phonograph. Recordings bear this out. When we say someone has a beautiful voice we usually mean a speaking or singing organ of great resonance, power, suppleness, freedom, range, capable of an infinitude of nuance, a strangely affecting Gestalt through which we experience a thrill akin to the sensation of flight. But there is another kind of voice than the merely frequency producing one, another kind of singer than the paragon of high notes - certain poets, who, either naturally, or by acquisition, have the ability to compose words which prescribe the voice which should utter them, poets with an “ear,” poets who never separate word from sounding tone and the percussive rhythm of consonants.

Here begins the great unwieldy poem, all light and mud, to which Ezra Pound devoted much of his life. It was the work of a poet too ambitious, too afraid of being cramped, to work according to a plan. Instead of a plan, Pound devised a strategy for creating a self-scrutinizing text, continually extending itself, ramifying outward, as it groped to comprehend its own prior meanings, to improvise new networks of connection, and to assimilate new material: a text shaped like a developing brain. New Cantos form themselves out of schemes to make sense of old Cantos: so the story of The Cantos comprises two intertwined stories, one concerning Pound's writing of the poem, the other concerning Pound's interpretations of what he had already written.

This twin story begins in 1915, when Pound was thirty years old. He was living in London, writing critical essays and reviews, shaping the modernist movement by propagandizing Eliot and other poets; and he felt that it was time to make a contribution of his own, by composing a grand poem worthy of Homer and Dante. As early as 1909, Pound told his mother that he intended to write an epic; but he was not immediately certain how to proceed.

Shifts in gender relations at the turn of the century were a key factor in the emergence of Modernism. The period from 1880 to 1920, within which Modernism emerged and rose to preeminence as the dominant art form in the West (it remained dominant until the end of World War II), was also the heyday of the first wave of feminism, consolidated in the woman suffrage movement. The protagonist of this movement was known as the “New Woman”: independent, educated, (relatively) sexually liberated, oriented more toward productive life in the public sphere than toward reproductive life in the home. The New Woman was dedicated, as Virginia Woolf passionately explained in “Professions for Women,” to the murder of the “Angel in the House,” Coventry Patmore's notorious poetic idealization of Victorian nurturant-domestic femininity. This New Woman inspired a great deal of ambivalent modernist characterization, from Hardy's Sue Bridehead and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler to Chopin's Edna Pontellier and Woolf's Lily Briscoe. But these famous characters, important as they are, constitute only the most obvious manifestation of turn-of-the-century feminism's formative influence on Modernism.

Ezra Pound made his first political statement when he was only seven years old. Reacting to the news that Grover Cleveland had defeated Benjamin Harrison in the presidential election of 1892, he threw his child's rocking chair across the room. Such a combination of rage and reaction would typify his approach to politics over his lifetime. But at that age his opinions were not yet his own, and his violent act was undoubtedly motivated by family discussions he had overheard. In his autobiography, Indiscretions (1920), he speculated:

As Pound remembered it, Homer Pound's job in the assayer's department at the US Mint in Philadelphia was not covered by the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which dealt only with offices with more than fifty employees.

Ezra Pound published some seven books that can fall under the heading Literary Criticism. The majority of these were collections of previously printed essays: Favannes and Divisions (1918), Instigations (1920), Make It New (1934), Polite Essays (1937). None of these has remained in print, having been replaced by T. S. Eliot's excellent selection Literary Essays (1954), and by William Cookson's omnium gatherum, Selected Prose (1973). These anthologies contain some of Pound's better known and more important critical writings. But they are necessarily uneven, for they have not been conceived as a single effort by their author.

A more unified picture of Pound the critic emerges from the books and pamphlets that he envisaged and brought forth as a whole. These are The Spirit of Romance (1910), How To Read (1931), ABC of Reading (1934), Guide to Kulchur (1938), Carta da Visita (1942). The two last are devoted only in part to literature, but this is characteristic of the uncompartmentalized way Pound worked. In fact, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935) could be added to the list of books of criticism that were created as wholes. These unified volumes make for exciting reading because they move with their own momentum, in a somewhat improvisational fashion, from day to day, and often refer to their writing in process by place and date.

“There they are, you will have to go a long way round / if you want to avoid them”: these lines from Basil Bunting's poem “On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos” have a slightly ominous tone, preparing us for the complications which haunt the reception of Pound's work in America. You can't avoid The Cantos, says Bunting, if you are in any sense committed to the art of poetry - at least the work you will need to do for yourself which Pound has already done for you will be immense - yet there are at the same time reasons why you still might want to avoid the poem. Tellingly, perhaps, Bunting's poem carries the dateline 1949, the year in which Pound, now confined in St. Elizabeths, received the Bollingen Prize for poetry. The award - for The Pisan Cantos - was bound to provoke controversy: was it acceptable to give this type of recognition to a man who had espoused fascism and antisemitism, or could the remarkable lyric beauty of the new sequence be judged apart, as something transcending political error?

It is within this quite explosive context that we have to consider the nature of Pound's influence on a younger generation of writers. Indeed, the ambivalence which is hinted at in Bunting's lines makes the whole issue of influence complicated, especially if we assume it to connote forms of anxiety and concealment as it famously does for Harold Bloom.

It is tempting to argue that all films are modernist, that the cinema itself is an accelerated image of modernity, like the railway and the telephone. But to do this is to miss the nostalgia inseparable from the way the medium has worked out historically, its (amply rewarded) yearning to become our century's version of last century's novel. There are modernist films, even outside the period we associate with Modernism; but the largest fact about the cinema over the hundred years since its birth is its comfortable embrace of ancient conventions of realism and narrative coherence.

When the German critic Walter Benjamin describes the strange mingling of artifice and illusion in the cinema - we know all about the tricky construction of the pictured world, which we nevertheless take as far more intimately actual than anything we could find in the live theatre - he says “the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.”