Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- A note on the edition
- A note on the translation
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- The Treatise
- Introduction
- 1 Bowed strings
- 2 Plucked strings
- 3 Strings with keyboard
- 4 Wind: Introduction
- 5 Wind with reeds
- 6 Wind without reeds
- 7 Wind with keyboard
- 8 Brass with mouthpiece
- 9 Woodwind with mouthpiece
- 10 Voices
- 11 Pitched percussion
- 12 Unpitched percussion
- 13 New instruments
- 14 The orchestra
- 15 The conductor and his art
- Appendix: Berlioz's writings on instruments
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of Berlioz's works
13 - New instruments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- A note on the edition
- A note on the translation
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- The Treatise
- Introduction
- 1 Bowed strings
- 2 Plucked strings
- 3 Strings with keyboard
- 4 Wind: Introduction
- 5 Wind with reeds
- 6 Wind without reeds
- 7 Wind with keyboard
- 8 Brass with mouthpiece
- 9 Woodwind with mouthpiece
- 10 Voices
- 11 Pitched percussion
- 12 Unpitched percussion
- 13 New instruments
- 14 The orchestra
- 15 The conductor and his art
- Appendix: Berlioz's writings on instruments
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of Berlioz's works
Summary
The author is doubtless under no sort of obligation to mention the multitude of experiments made daily by instrument manufacturers and their vaunted, mostly disastrous, inventions, nor to report the pointless individual specimens they would like to add to the race of instruments. But he should draw the attention of composers to the good advances made by inventive musicians, especially when their excellence is widely recognised and when they have already been adopted in the musical practice of a considerable part of Europe. These innovators are in any case few in number, and MM. Adolphe Sax and Edouard Alexandre stand at their head.
THE SAXOPHONE
We shall begin with M. Sax, who has made improvements to many well established instruments, as I have already indicated here and there in the course of the present study. He has filled many gaps in the family of brass instruments. His principal achievement in recent years, nonetheless, is the creation of a new family of instruments which use a single reed and a clarinet mouthpiece and are made of brass. These are the saxophones.
Berlioz played a crucial part in the early history of the saxophone and is generally credited with being the first to write about it. His support was critical in Sax's early success in Paris. Although this chapter of the Treatise was added for the 1855 edition, he first mentioned the saxophone in 1842 and wrote a brief section on it in the 1844 edition. For the sake of completeness I include here all Berlioz's writings on the saxophone in chronological order. […]
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- Berlioz's Orchestration TreatiseA Translation and Commentary, pp. 296 - 318Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002