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Segell, Michael.
The Devil's Horn.
New York: Picador, 2005.
ISBN 0-312-42557-0.
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When Napoléon III seized power and proclaimed himself
Emperor of France in 1851, his very first decree did not have
to do with any of the social, economic, or political crises
the country faced, but rather reinstating the saxophone in
French military bands, reversing a ban on the instrument imposed
by the Second Republic (p. 220). There is something about
the saxophone—its lascivious curves and seductive sound,
perhaps, or its association with avant
garde and not entirely respectable music—which has
made it the object of attacks by prudes, puritans, and musical
elitists almost from the time of its invention in the early 1840s
by Belgian Adolphe Sax. Nazi Germany banned the sax
as “decadent”; Stalin considered it a “dangerous
capitalist instrument” and had saxophonists shot or sent
to Siberia; the League of Catholic Decency in the United States
objected not to the steamy images on the screen in the 1951
film A Streetcar Named Desire,
but rather the sultry saxophone music which accompanied it, and signed
off on the scene when it was re-scored for French horn and strings;
and in Kansas City, Missouri, it was once against the law to play a
saxophone outside a nightclub from ten-thirty at night until six in
the morning (which seems awfully early to me to be playing a
saxophone unless you've been at it all night).
Despite its detractors, political proscribers, somewhat
disreputable image, and failure to find a place in
symphony orchestras, this relative newcomer has infiltrated
almost all genres of music, sparked the home music and
school band crazes in the United States, and became
central to the twentieth century evolution of jazz,
big band, rhythm and blues, and soul music. A large and
rapidly expanding literature of serious and experimental
music for the instrument exists, and many conservatories
which once derided the “vulgar horn” now
teach it.
This fascinating book tells the story of Sax, the saxophone,
saxophonists, and the music and culture they have engendered.
Even to folks like myself who cannot coax music from
anything more complicated than an iPod (I studied saxophone for
two years in grade school before concluding, with the enthusiastic
concurrence of my aurally assaulted parents, that my talents
lay elsewhere) will find many a curious and delightful detail
to savour, such as the monstrous
contrabass
saxophone (which sounds
something
like a foghorn), and the fact that Adolphe Sax, something of a
mad scientist, also invented (but, thankfully, never built)
an organ powered by a locomotive engine which could “play
the music of Meyerbeer for all of Paris” and the
“Saxocannon”, a mortar which would fire a
half-kiloton bullet 11 yards wide, which “could level
an entire city” (pp. 27–28)—and people
complain about the saxophone! This book will make you want to
re-listen to a lot of music, which you're likely to understand
much better knowing the story of how it, and those who
made it, came to be.
June 2007 