As a saxophonist, I am often asked the question, "What do you play on the saxophone?" I was asked that question during my first visit to Taiwan, and I didn't know how to response. What do you mean, what do I play? Music, of course! But as the same question continued to be asked over the years, I began to think deeper into what people really meant by it, and have come up with several possibilities. 1) People are being friendly, and are using this question as a conversation opener, or 2) They are waiting for me to answer with something like, "Oh, Kenny G!" or 3) what they really want to ask is, "What a weird instrument, why do you play that?"
Since the 150th birthday of the saxophone is soon coming up, I thought it would be a good idea to talk a little about the saxophone, where it comes from, and what it means to me as a player. Maybe I can answer that last question for some curious readers.
The History:
The saxophone was born out of the mind of a clever young man named Adolph Sax. His father, a Belgium manufacturer of brass and woodwind instruments, introduced his first of eleven children, Adolph, to the art of instrument making at an early age. "By the age of six, he was able to properly drill a clarinet's body, and twirl the cup of a horn...While still an apprentice in his father's workshop, young Sax learned the flute and the clarinet, attending the Brussels Conservatory...and at fifteen, Sax sent two ivory clarinets and flutes to the Brussels Industrial Convention of 1830. At twenty, Sax had reinvented the unreliable and defective bass-clarinet." The young inventor was soon becoming recognized throughout the musical capitals of Europe. Disappointed with Brussels, an ambitious Sax left for Paris in 1842, ready to change musical history.
After his arrival in Paris, Sax was able to draw some worthy attention to his new instruments, where he found helpful friends and admirers. "Berloiz, Meyerbeer, Rossini, King Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III were among his constant supporters." He was well recognized by the principal musicians in the Paris Opera who were impressed enough by the scope of his inventions to fully support him in his quest to revamp the traditional instrumental structure of the concert band.
What Adolphe Sax wanted, was to make a new family of instruments that could incorporate the warmth of a clarinet with the brightness of a trumpet. After six years of continuous struggle, Sax came up with a family of "Saxophones" that had a single reed and utilized a brass body. In his patent, granted on June 22, 1846, he described a family of 14 different saxophones. "They were divided into groups for band and orchestra. Each group ranged from high-pitched sopraninos to the low-voiced contrabass. Of these, six saxophones are still used today (150 years later): sopranino, soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass." The new instrument, wrote one musicologist, "is based on a principle never before applied to the construction of any sonorous apparatus that the modern world has inherited from bygone centuries or exotic peoples; the vibration of an air column inside a conical tube, by means of a mobile reed similar to that of the clarinet."
Still, Sax needed to get his unusual instruments accepted into the musical world, and in Paris, that world revolved around a society of orchestras, symphonies, and military bands. Sax was surrounded by jealous enemies, and soon found himself bankrupt amid lawsuits to protect his patents. Finally, through an unusual contest held in 1845, Sax challenged his enemies to a live performance contest in front of 20,000 Parisians. "The two hostile groups stood in a single line, one next to the other. In front of them stood the Commission (appointed by the Government). Sax himself was late, and seven of his musicians failed to turn up, perhaps led astray by the enemy." Afterwards everyone agreed, Sax's band was "far superior." This victory led to the purchase of Sax's new instruments for all of the army bands in France, and secured for Sax the legitimacy and income he needed to continue.
Despite this success, Sax never had it easy. He struggled to defend his inventions, and had to "pay the ransom for his creativeness; he had to face the envy and jealously, the wrath and hatred of his rivals and colleagues; he underwent all kinds of misery, suffering and affliction." All this, and the fact that he was talented, arrogant, and temperamental added up to a very complicated and trying career. Adolphe Sax died, as did most great creators, exhausted and broke, with nothing more than a growing legacy that would eventually become one of the most recognizable and unique sounds in modern popular music, the saxophone.
So what does this strange instrument mean to me?
Playing the saxophone has helped me understand more about the mystery of music. Music is much more than black notes on a page. It is much more than a band playing live, or a great concert orchestra. It is more than CD recordings, our favorite singers, or even the Juilliard School.
Music is emotion in abstract form. Music evokes feelings, conjures up fantasies, and fills the empty place in the bottom of our hearts. There is a secret language that is shared by music and emotion, and we hear it whenever music is played. For some, only classical music can bring this feeling to life, for others, a thrash rock band. This is the great mystery of music: Why does it make us feel something whenever we hear it? This is the question I have been trying to answer by playing the saxophone. How does music make a listener feel like they are in a foreign country, sitting at a streetside coffeshop watching the people pass by? How can a song remind us of the color of our high school sweetheart's eyes?
Trying to unravel this mystery is why I keep playing the saxophone. There is a link between a musician and his audience, and I want to know how this link works. The more I play, the more I wonder about this mystery, and the more I wonder, the more I keep playing. I think I will always be looking for the answer. I think that's why painters paint, why writers write, and why cooks keep cooking. When I play the saxophone, I feel music in a strange and physical way, like I am close to something incredibly beautiful, but not quite. All this thinking about things has made me understand something about myself. I should learn how to express myself as best as I can so that the people who listen to my music can feel something meaningful and real when I play. A musician's true goal, I believe, is to act as a medium between the dark mystery of music and the emotional joy it evokes. That is what I play on the saxophone.
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