National Saxophone Day commemorates the birth of Adolphe Sax, on Sun. 06-Nov-1814.
He is the illustrious inventor of the saxophone, one of the main instruments in jazz music.
My favorite musical instrument -- one I can listen to, all day, is the saxophone – a brass-bodied single-reed woodwind instrument.
It is not technically a brass instrument, because:
The most common types of saxophone are the soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophone.
| left to right: Soprano-, Alto-, Tenor- and Baritone saxophones. |
Among the uncommon types of saxophone are the sopranino and soprillo. These two play even higher, a full octave above the soprano.
The bass saxophone plays lower than the baritone. Even lower is the contrabass saxophone, and the subcontrabass saxophone -- the largest and the lowest-playing saxophone in existence.
Today, Sun. 06-Nov-2022 is is the 208th birth anniversary of Adolphe Sax (Sun. 06-Nov-1814 – Wed. 07-Feb-1894).
This accident-prone Belgian inventor, flautist and clarinet player, had a weird tale.
When he was 2 years old, he fell three floors out of a window, hit his head on a stone floor and fractured his skull. He could barely stand afterwards.
When he was 3 years old, he swallowed a needle.
When he was 6 years old, he mistakenly drank boric acid.
When he was 9 years old, he fell off a small cliff and broke his leg.
When he was 11 years old, he contracted measles and was in a coma for nine days.
When he was 14 years old, he broke his arm when it caught in a carriage door.
When he was 19 years old, while walking in the streets, a large slate tile flew off a nearby roof and onto his head, putting him again into a coma for some time.
When he was 23 years old, he almost died from the effects of wine accidentally contaminated with furniture varnish.
His mother once said, “Hij een kind is dat gedoemd is tot ongeluk; hij zal niet leven”.
(He is a child that is doomed to unluckiness; he will not live [to be an adult] ).
His neighbors called him “kleine Sax, de geest” (little Sax, the ghost).
Despite all these hurdles, Adolphe Sax’s first important invention was an improved bass clarinet which he patented at the age of 24. And when he was 29 years old, Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone in the early 1840s and patented it in 1846.
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Adolphe Sax’s House at Rue Adolphe Sax 37, 5500 Dinant, in the province of Namur, Belgium is now a little museum. On the yellow poster on the house, behind the statue of Adolphe Sax and his tenor saxophone, it says... J’ai voulu creér un instrument qui par le caractère de sa voix pût se rapprocher des instruments à cordes, mais qui possédât plus de force et d’intensité que ces derniers ~Adolphe Sax. I translate: |
By then, he had designed saxophones ranging from sopranino to subcontrabass although not all were immediately built.
1846 was when the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was born in India, when the British East India Company signed the Treaty of Amritsar with the Dogra ruler, Maharaja Gulab Singh.
Adolphe Sax also invented the saxotromba for the French cavalry, the saxhorn with its characteristic mellow tone quality and the saxtuba with a rotatable pavilion (pavillons tournants).
Adolphe Sax arrived in Paris with only 30 francs in his pocket. Forced to live in a shed, he borrowed money to survive. When French opera composer Fromental Halévy introduced him to Hector Berlioz, his fortunes turned around. In 1842 Sax showed Berlioz an early version of his baritone saxophone, an instrument different from any other that had been made up to that time. It had the power of brass instruments, but it was sounded with a reed and had the expressive, voice-like qualities of reed woodwinds. Berlioz wrote in the
Journal des Débats, Paris’s most influential arts publication…
“Adolphe Sax is a calculator, an acoustician, and when required, a smelter, a turner and, if need be, at the same time an embosser. He can think and act. He invents, and he accomplishes.”
Rival musical instrument makers of Paris formed an association just to take Sax down and by attacking the legitimacy of his patents Sax sued them for patent infringement. Twenty years of legal troubles drove him into bankruptcy three times: in 1852, 1873, and 1877. Sax suffered from lip cancer between 1853 and 1858 but made a full recovery.
In 1894 he died in poverty in Paris. He was 79 yrs, 3 mo. old.
When we lived in Europe, back in the autumn of 1986, my wife Amita, my two-year-old elder son, Aniruddh and I visited Adolphe Sax’s birthplace: Dinant, 90 km SE of Brussels, Belgium in the Ardennes where the Battle of the Bulge was fought around New Year’s 1945. The “Bulge” was the largest and bloodiest single battle fought by the USA in World War II.
| 200 Belgian Franc banknote (top side) with pic of Adolphe Sax and (reverse side). |
| The pavements on both sides of the road on Charles de Gaulle Bridge, are now decorated with 28 giant colorful saxophone sculptures, each over three meters high. |
The tourist flyer of the city of Dinant, is named Sax and the City.
King Willem Frederik, Prince of Orange, King of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg, who reigned in Belgium too in those years, made Adolphe Sax the predominant supplier of brass musical instruments to his army.