Musical Inventors, Part 10: Adolphe Sax And The Saxophone

When he was two or three years old, he fell three stories, hitting his head on the stone floor at the bottom.

Soon after, he drank what he thought was a bowl of milk but was actually diluted acid.

• He swallowed a pin and somehow passed it without injury.
• At ten, he fell into a river, was found floating face down and rescued, but was in a coma for days.
• He nearly asphyxiated while sleeping in a room with freshly varnished furniture.
• He was burned in an accidental explosion in his parents’ workshop and burned again when he fell into a hot stove. The burns left him permanently scarred on one side of his body.

All that happened before he reached adulthood. His mother was sure he would die young. He was nicknamed “the ghost child.”

His birth name was Antoine-Joseph Sax.

Both his parents, Charles-Joseph and Marie-Joseph, were instrument builders and made significant improvements to existing horns. They were among the first to add valves to brass instruments, including the French horn. This helped pave the way for the fully valved French horn, which became the standard by the mid-19th century.

His parents taught him instrument building as a trade, so Adolphe could support himself later.

Wind instruments are a pipe curved into a portable size.

The longer the pipe, the lower the pitch.

But that’s pitch. Many other characteristics affect an instrument’s tone.

If the pipe is the same diameter for all its length, which is known as a “cylindrical” shape, it will sound bright. If the pipe gradually widens throughout its length, known as “conical,” it will sound warm and mellow. 

Likewise, the shape of the bell affects the tone.

Sax understood all of this. He made his instruments so well that when he entered a clarinet and two flutes in a competition at the Belgian National Exhibition, he was recommended for the gold medal. However, since he was only 15 at the time, the judges ruled that because he was so young, winning such a prestigious award would give him nothing to aim for the following year. This apparently happened for several years running.

It was always this way with Sax.

He was brilliant, and people either loved or hated him for it. Each success was also a failure, and each made him more eccentric, egotistical, difficult, and divisive.

After graduation, he began experimenting with instrument design. The first instrument he tackled was the bass clarinet.

In 1839, Sax took his bass clarinet to Paris and showed it to Isacc Dacosta, a clarinetist at the Paris Academy of Music. Dacosta had been working on his own design but liked Sax’s better. He introduced Sax to important musicians in the city. Sax would work with many of them in the coming years.

He then created the saxhorn family of instruments.

Saxhorns are similar to brass instruments that already existed — like Louis Alexandre Frichot’s English bass horn — but have conical pipes like bugles, and three valves like trumpets.

The saxhorn family ranged from the contrabass to the sopranino, but we rarely call them saxhorns today. We just call them by their pitch, like the alto horn or the baritone horn. The one you’re probably most familiar with is the flugelhorn, which looks like a beefy trumpet, and you may know it from Chuck Mangione’s 1978 hit, “Feels So Good.” 

And then he invented the saxophone.

His initial prototype was a single reed mouthpiece, like the ones used on clarinets, mounted on an ophicleide, which we covered in the previous article. The resulting horn was loud like a trumpet but sonorous like a clarinet. He refined this into, more or less, what we know today as the saxophone.

It was revolutionary. Though he meant for it to be an orchestral instrument, it became more popular in marching bands and, later, big bands, Jazz and Rock & Roll.

After all, no saxophone?

Like he had done with the saxhorn, he designed a family of saxophones, from the subcontrabass up to the sopranino, though he didn’t actually build all of them. The most popular ones today are the tenor and alto, but the baritone and soprano also make star turns occasionally.

At 27, Sax again entered several instruments in the National Exposition, including the saxophone.

Despite that, Sax’s other instruments earned him another recommendation for the gold medal but the Central Jury gave him second place, again, and he swore off ever entering the competition again.

This loss helped him realize his future was limited in Belgium. In 1842 he moved to Paris, where he already knew musicians from his previous visit. One of the first things he did there was invite composer Hector Berlioz to come see his new instruments. Berlioz was so impressed that he wrote a glowing article for Journal des debats in which he called Sax a man of “a man of penetrating mind; lucid, tenacious, with a perseverance against all trials, and great skill.”

This enthusiastic introduction to Sax and his instruments brought him business, but it also hurt him. The same jealousies that his competitors displayed in Belgium began in competing builders in Paris. 

Other builders convinced Sebastien’s musicians to threaten to quit if he used Sax’s instrument. Sebastien removed it from his score.

Berlioz talked about the incident in a letter, saying, “Such is the hatred inventors inspire in rivals who are incapable of inventing anything themselves.”

Sax would sometimes challenge these rivals to duels.

Sax introduced the saxophone to France at the 1844 Paris Industrial Exhibition by playing it behind a curtain. He hadn’t yet patented it and thought other builders would steal his design.

The military bands were in rough shape following the Revolution, and the government was anxious to bring them up to par. Putting out a call for ideas, it came down to another musical duel between the two finalists. 20,000 people attended the concert on April 22, 1845.

Both bands would perform the same pieces written by Adolphe Adam. One played traditional instruments. The other played Sax’s instruments. The new instruments won in a clean sweep – and Sax was awarded the contract.

His win incensed his critics, saying the contract should go to a Frenchman, not this upstart from Belgium.

They challenged Sax’s patent of the saxophone in lawsuit after lawsuit:

• First saying the instrument wasn’t what was in the patent
• Then saying it wasn’t musical enough to be called a musical instrument
• Then saying it was too similar to earlier instruments to be patentable.

They even purchased saxophones from Sax and sent them to other builders outside the country who replaced the Sax emblem with their own. That was so L’Association could say that Sax stole the idea from a foreign builder. It didn’t stand up in court either.

Maybe the idea was not to win these cases, but to bankrupt Sax with legal fees. It’s a standard ploy rich people do to the not-so-rich.

Sax turned the tables.

No one did so with even a modicum of quality, so he resubmitted his application and the patent was granted in June of 1846.

Shortly thereafter, Sax’s factory caught fire. No one knows how. Then someone shot a gun at his assistant outside the shop at night. It’s suspected that L’Association were behind both incidents, and that the unknown gunman thought he was shooting at Sax.

During that time, he struggled to keep his company afloat. A friend gave him ₣30,000. However the friend died and his family insisted the money was a loan, not a gift. They gave him 24 hours to repay the money in full. He couldn’t, and, like Louis-Philippe before him, fled to England. He couldn’t escape the lawsuit though, and the court ordered him to repay the ₣30,000.

However, two years later, the new French leader, Emperor Napoleon III, made Sax the Musical Instrument Maker to the Household Troops. He returned to France, reopened his factory and paid off all his debts.

During his time in England, he noticed a small black growth on his lip. By 1859, the cancer was so big that he had to eat through a tube. The traditional medical treatment of the time would have removed at least part of his jaw. He turned to a doctor from India who treated him with a mixture of herbs. In less than a year, the tumor disappeared entirely. It may have been the herbs or it may have been Sax’s willpower.

He continued making instruments for the rest of his life, and came up with some other inventions. Two ideas that were never built were an organ on a hill that would have been so loud that it could be heard all over Paris, and a cannon big enough to launch a 500 ton missile that could destroy an entire city. He called it, of course, the saxocannon.

Sax declared bankruptcy twice more, in 1873 and 1877, primarily due to continued attacks by his enemies. The irony is that, as the patents expired, rival instrument builders made money copying his designs. He wrote an essay appealing to the public for support, saying that the French musical industry was worthless until he arrived:

“I created this industry; I carried it to an unrivaled height; I developed the legions of workers and musicians, and it is above all my counterfeiters who have profited from my work.”

His egotism didn’t change any minds, but his friends asked the French government to provide Sax with a small pension for his remaining years. It was granted and he lived until pneumonia took him at the age of 79.

His youngest son, Adolphe-Edouard Sax, took over the business in 1894. Adolphe-Edouard ran the company for many years but it had continued financial problems.

In 2012, Karel Goetghebeur, a Belgian saxophone player and former funeral director, bought the rights to the Sax name.

His idea was to return the saxophone to its home country and he opened the Adolphe Sax & Cie. factory in Brugge. Goetghebeur also runs a company called Sax4Pax that makes saxophones out of artillery shells left over from the world wars.

And if you ever visit Dinant, there are tributes to their hometown hero everywhere.

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