Music - Resources by Instrument

The only comprehensive bibliographical index of music for saxophone. More than 18,000 works for saxophone from 1844-2003, the entire lifespan of the saxophone, are cross-indexed by composer and instrumentation. Each entry includes title, duration, year of composition, publisher, arranger, dedicatee, movement titles, and composer information.

In The Devil's Horn, Michael Segell traces the 160-year history of the saxophone-a horn that created a sound never before heard in nature, and that from the moment it debuted has aroused both positive and negative passions among all who hear it. The saxophone has insinuated itself into virtually every musical idiom that has come along since its birth as well as into music with traditions thousands of years old. But it has also been controversial, viewed as a symbol of decadence, immorality and lasciviousness:it was banned in Japan, saxophonists have been sent to Siberian lockdown by Communist officials, and a pope even indicted it.Segell outlines the saxophone's fascinating history while he highlights many of its legendary players, including Benny Carter, Illinois Jacquet, Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, Phil Woods, Branford Marsalis, and Michael Brecker. The Devil's Horn explores the saxophone's intersections with social movement and change, the innovative acoustical science behind the instrument, its struggles in the world of "legit" music, and the mystical properties that seduce all who fall under its influence. Colorful, evocative, and richly informed, The Devil's Horn is an ingenious portrait of one of the most popular instruments in the world.

"Who can resist the call of the saxophone? This expressive instrument is at the very heart of 20th-century music. Celebrating the Saxophone is a colorful and affectionate look at its richly diverse history. Paul Lindemeyer follows its progress from the 1840s Paris workshop of Adolphe Sax, through years of obscurity in band music, to its eventual fame in 1920s America, to the election of a sax-playing President." "The saxophone is best known as the symbol - and musical standard-bearer - of jazz. Celebrating the Saxophone illustrates its role in the music from early times - when Sidney Bechet became the pioneer jazz saxman - to the present, when artists like Branford Marsalis have won unparalleled public acceptance. The saxophone's development as the creative jazz voice is traced in profiles of its great innovators - among them Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane. Yet jazz is only part of the story. Classical saxophonists have been gaining long-overdue acceptance. And the horn has played many roles in popular music - from the ragtime virtuosity of Rudy Wiedoeft, to the big band era, to the ever-popular David Sanborn."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In the first fully comprehensive study of one of the worlds most iconic musical instruments, Stephen Cottrell examines the saxophone’s various social, historical, and cultural trajectories, and illustrates how and why this instrument, with its idiosyncratic shape and sound, became important for so many different music-makers around the world. After considering what led inventor Adolphe Sax to develop this new musical wind instrument, Cottrell explores changes in saxophone design since the 1840s before examining the instrument's role in a variety of contexts: in the military bands that contributed so much to the saxophone's global dissemination during the nineteenth century; as part of the rapid expansion of American popular music around the turn of the twentieth century; in classical and contemporary art music; in world and popular music; and, of course, in jazz, a musical style with which the saxophone has become closely identified.