It's fairly obvious by now that the saxophone is a huge part of my life. I started an interesting book about the history of the saxophone* and learned that the horn was in fairly constant threat of never being built at all. And once it was built, it was targeted, maligned, marginalized, stolen, and mangled. Even after it was patented and widely built, it still took a lot of effort to get the sax off of the "novelty" list. Let me explain.
Adolphe Sax (yes, that's how the horn got its name) was born in Dinant, Belgium in 1814 and was a walking accident. At age two, he fell down a flight of stairs, hit his head on a rock, and was comatose for a week. Shortly after that, he mistakenly drank sulfate of zinc and nearly died. Further misadventures arose from ingesting arsenic, white lead, copper oxide, and swallowing a needle. He survived several explosions and another coma (brought about by being in the wrong place when a heavy slate tile fell from a roof), and when he was ten, he almost drowned. That would have been the end of young Mr. Sax, were it not for a villager who happened to walk by at the right time to fish him out of the water.
His father was a leading instrument maker in Belgium at the time, and so young Adolphe learned a lot about building instruments by just hanging around the workshop. Adolphe was precocious, developing a new fingering system for the clarinet before age 20, and making incredible refinements to the then ailing bass clarinet.
To be continued...
* The Devil's Horn. Micheal Segell. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: New York. 2005.
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