Horning In

As a boy in early 19th century Belgium, Adolphe Sax was struck on the head by a brick. The accident-prone lad also swallowed a needle, fell down a flight of stairs, toppled onto a burning stove, and accidentally drank some sulfuric acid. When he grew up, he invented the saxophone.

Only a child that familiar with adversity, contend critics of the saxophone, could have foisted such a contraption on an unsuspecting world. A hybrid of the brass and woodwind families, the instrument is the perennial Cinderella of serious music. Its rich, sometimes dozing sound has never found a permanent place in the symphony orchestra, although after its invention in 1840 such French composers as Berlioz and Massenet experimented with it. In Germany only Richard Strauss, whose Domestic Symphony included a quartet of saxes, regarded it as anything but a yeoman of military bands.

The continuing disdain in which 20th century composers hold the sax is also due in part to its ascendancy in the 1920s as a leading voice of dance and jazz bands. (Critic Leonard Feather once wrote that the coat of arms for F. Scott Fitzgerald could have been two alto saxophones rampant on a field of cocktail shakers.) Even so, the sax had to overcome the prejudice of old-line jazz purists. Trumpeter Bunk Johnson once complained that it did not fit into the traditional New Orleans ensemble of trumpet, trombone and clarinet. "It just runs up and downstairs with no place to go," said Bunk.

Now saxophonists have begun organizing to do something about their collective inferiority complex. In Toronto, 400 players from North America, Europe and the Far East gathered recently for the third World Saxophone Congress. The aim of the congress was to win a chair for the sax in the orchestra and to encourage composers to write more and better solo music for the instrument.

Some of the new works featured saxophone solos played against taped backgrounds of spoken dialogue, birdcalls or bursts of electronic light and shadow. The Robert Sibbing Quintet of Macomb, Ill., even turned up with a complete Mozart string quintet transcribed for the sax. French Virtuoso Jean-Marie Londeix wailed into some high, American-style leaps during the premiere of Fellow Countryman Guy Lacour's Hommage `a Jacques Ibert, thereby precipitating excited talk of a possible fusion between the French school of playing (bright, full tone, strict adherence to the instrument's normal 2 1/2-octave range) and the American (more jazz-influenced, less inhibited in tone and pitch).

Before the first saxophone congress in Chicago in 1969, few saxophonists realized the power of positive brotherhood. Now a sense of identity is emerging, according to James Houlik of East Carolina University: "You don't see violinists gathering like this, dunning composers for new works. We're pioneers." Maybe so. Londeix, at any rate, recently assembled a catalogue of 3,000 original saxophone pieces. It is already badly out of date. The Toronto delegates brought 200 new compositions with them.

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