Twenty Keys

The left thumb had two jobs. In Georges Kastner’s saxophone method, published in 1846, it operated keys numbered 16 and 20. The right thumb supported the instrument. Between them, the fingers had to move easily, without becoming either stiff or slack. The tongue began a note with the syllable tu.

These were instructions for something few musicians had yet held. Adolphe Sax had patented his saxophone family that year, but a patent could neither explain where to put a thumb nor persuade a composer to write a useful part. Kastner, a composer and writer on instruments, undertook both kinds of persuasion. He had already used the saxophone in his biblical opera Le dernier roi de Juda. Now he wanted other people to learn it.

The new instrument had no jazz associations to help it along. It had a reed, a metal body, a manufacturer’s ambitions and a growing need for players.

A low voice with room to move

Sax grew up around wind-instrument making in his father Charles-Joseph’s Brussels workshop. He also played wind instruments himself. Improving the bass clarinet gave him experience of a problem that extended beyond one instrument: how to produce a dependable low voice, with enough strength to stand beside louder instruments and enough flexibility to do more than reinforce them.

Hector Berlioz heard the promise in an early saxophone. Writing in the Journal des débats on 12 June 1842, he described a brass instrument shaped rather like an ophicleide, the keyed brass bass used in bands and orchestras. An ophicleide player made the lips vibrate against a cup-shaped mouthpiece. Sax’s instrument instead used a mouthpiece resembling that of a bass clarinet, with a single reed.

That small vibrating strip mattered more than the metal’s appearance. It let the player begin and shape a note through the reed, while the instrument’s keys changed the effective length of the air column. The tube widened along its length. Openings in its sides, covered by padded keys, allowed notes to change without the player having to reach and seal every hole directly with a fingertip.

Berlioz praised the strength and steadiness of the low notes, but also the possibility of making the sound swell and diminish. He had a limit in mind, however. Complicated arpeggios and rapid passages, he thought, would never suit it. He was quite content to protect this majestic low instrument from musical frivolity.

Four years later, Kastner was advertising considerable agility. His method described complicated, rapid passages as playable and offered the inventor’s own playing as evidence. The instruments and their possibilities were still developing; Berlioz’s early low saxophone was not a finished specification for every member of the family.

Kastner consulted a player as well as an inventor.

In his preface, he explained why Sax’s help mattered: Sax played the instrument and knew its properties. The method’s practical authority rested partly on that exchange between the person designing the mechanism and the person explaining what a musician could do with it.

One fingering, several sizes

Kastner’s promise was a family that a musician could move around. The illustrated model in his book had twenty keys, including two for the octaves. A foldout table connected notes on a stave to numbered keys on a drawing of the instrument. Some notes received a second column showing an alternative fingering. Beneath the table came the central assurance: the fingering was the same for all saxophones.

That did not make every size equally convenient for every task. Kastner recommended beginning on a higher instrument—a soprano, alto or tenor—then transferring that knowledge to the lower members, whose chief work he considered accompaniment. If a pupil possessed only a bass or contrabass, the teacher should choose suitable exercises from the book.

He treated the player’s body as part of the arrangement. The lower instruments could lean across it; a supporting cord helped carry the weight. The head should remain upright. Sitting, standing and marching required different accommodations, so one rigid posture would not serve them all. The mechanism had to meet a moving person.

The book went beyond getting a sound out of the mouthpiece. It supplied exercises, lessons and pieces, followed by music that gave the instrument more conspicuous work. Kastner listed variations for E-flat alto and piano, dedicated to Sax, and a sextet for two sopranos, one alto, two basses and a contrabass. An instrument family needed something to play together.

His ambitions reached symphony orchestras, military bands and solo performance. The same book that explained a thumb’s duties also tried to enlarge the instrument’s employment prospects.

A closer look · 4:28 · English

Among the early wind instruments

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A product still being changed

Sax’s workshop did not settle every detail at once. One early E-flat baritone, numbered 4634 and now dated to around 1847, preserves changes that later instruments abandoned. Instrument historian Albert Rice described pads screwed into their key cups, flat brass springs and long key levers. Soldering and the repositioning of the A tone hole show adjustment of the instrument’s working dimensions after its body had been made.

Those details belong to that baritone. The later alto pictured here has its own construction and history. Together, the surviving instruments resist the idea that the 1846 patent fixed every curve, lever and opening for good.

Military music offered a substantial use for the family. The engraved bell of the Met’s alto identifies it as a patented E-flat saxophone and names Sax in Paris. It also advertises his position as instrument maker to the Emperor’s military establishment. The title placed a powerful customer’s endorsement on the product itself.

By 1854, an imperial decree specified soprano, alto, tenor and baritone-or-bass saxophones in French infantry bands. Different registers could now be bought and organised as part of an ensemble. The learner needed a fingering system; the band also needed a dependable supply of instruments and people trained to play them.

Instruments kept, instruments issued

Sax also kept instruments that he was not trying to sell as new products. His private collection included his father’s work, competitors’ instruments, old European examples and instruments from farther afield. Four now at Brussels’s Musical Instruments Museum had been collected by Guillaume-André Villoteau during Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. They belonged to an earlier history of collecting, rather than supplying evidence for a particular Sax invention.

When Sax’s company went bankrupt in 1877, the collection was offered for sale. It comprised 467 instruments. Victor-Charles Mahillon, curator of the newly founded Brussels instrument museum, was among the buyers; the MIM now preserves 33 instruments from Sax’s private collection. A maker’s collection had become part of a public one.

Other saxophones had taken a less conspicuous route out of the workshop. A report on the instruments of military pupils at the Paris Conservatoire assigned one to Compère and another to Édouard Thuillier, matching each pupil with an individual instrument number.

Théodore Gluck was allocated a saxophone too. He won a first prize in 1863. Thuillier took a second prize the following year.