The Devil's Horn: The Story of the Saxophone, From Noisy Novelty to King of Cool by Michael Segell

Author:Michael Segell
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Arts & Photography, History & Criticism, Instruments, Popular Culture, Woodwinds, Saxophones, Politics & Social Sciences, Music, Instruments & Performers, Brass, Social Sciences
ISBN: 0374159386
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2005-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Conn’s successor, Carl Greenleaf, presided over the company’s heyday, deploying his own spirit of invention. He retooled the Elkhart plant, fought to diminish the power of the union, and introduced stenciled engraving to reduce costs. Although the company continued to make a range of band instruments, Greenleaf expanded production of saxophones to 150 horns a day. The popularity of the saxophone had enabled other instrument makers—Buescher, Martin, Holton, and H. N. White, which made Charlie Parker’s favorite, the King Super 20—to grab pieces of the ravenous market; at the height of the craze, they were producing a combined 6,000 saxophones a month. The quest for a competitive edge resulted in continuous subtle refinements of the saxophone’s mechanics: in the twenties and thirties, forty-five patents relating to saxophones were granted by the U.S. Patent Office.

Unrestrained by truth-in-advertising laws or simple common sense, the competitors’ marketing campaigns strove to outdo each other in their outlandish claims. “Learning to play the Saxophone is much the same as a youngster learning numbers and letters by moving blocks—and almost as simple,” declared the Buescher company. Conn linked its horns with the pursuit, and attainment, of the American dream: “Popularity, pleasure, a big income, all may be yours if you start now to cultivate your musical ‘bump’ with a Conn saxophone.” To demonstrate the ease with which the instrument could be played, one of Conn’s advertorials in Musical Truth showed a woman executing a somersault on the wing of an airplane while playing a solo. Conn’s “Aqua Jazz” ad featured saxophonists toeing surfboards and playing one-handed on water skis. The Buescher company responded with clever schemes of its own. When Commander Donald MacMillan sailed for the North Pole in 1921, the company outfitted his crew with a Buescher saxophone.

Greenleaf’s most profitable move was to involve his company in the emerging school band movement, an outgrowth of the rapid changes occurring in the country’s public education system. Up to 1885, the American school curriculum was rigidly classical, modeled after a European system that emphasized foreign languages, physics, chemistry, algebra, geometry, and history. Despite the claim fifty years earlier by Lowell Mason, the conductor and music-education crusader, that any child could learn to sing, there was little teaching of vocal or instrumental music in the American school system. There were exceptions, however: Heeding Mason’s advice, Boston public schools introduced vocal instruction. In 1857 the Boston Farm and Trades School established a school band, supported by school funds. And a high school in Middletown, Ohio, had a student “orchestra” in 1863.

The interest in teaching children music coincided with a growing interest in their welfare generally. Public high school enrollments rose from around 200,000 in 1890 to nearly a million in 1910. As cities grew and the pace of American life quickened, schools took on a greater role in providing leisure-time and enrichment activities. Several states formed associations starting in 1898 to organize school sports programs. Schools added cafeterias, nurses, and guidance counselors. Communities saw a need to provide suitable recreational activities for the growing youthful population.

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