Bob,

Thanks for the news link.

There are two things that the article failed to mention which any student of musical instruments may be interested to learn.

The Saxophone is one of the earliest and, and possibly the very first example, of a deliberate and completely systematic design of a musical instrument, as opposed to all of the musical instruments which evolved gradually during human history. Consequently, the fingering was intelligently designed to be as easy as possible and allow playing difficult musical passages.

In contrast, the flute evolved over thousands of years -a very ancient bone flute was found in a cave of our early ancestors. One of the most recent improvements of the flute fingering is the Boehm system. The Clarinet has also undergone improvements in modern times to improve the playing of difficult musical passages etc, although it's origin is also believed to have been in the very far past.

Many of the modern musical instruments may have been born independently in various regions of the world, just consider the wide variety of bowed string instruments currently available in Africa, South America, Asia, as well as in various parts of Europe and America. Some may have been dispersed by ancient travelers.

By the time of Adolphe Sax's instrument making, the most sophisticated instrument makers understood much of the practical acoustics necessary for constructing differently scaled versions of their instruments -they were no longer limited to trial and error (where to place the holes in a tube and what size to make them).

The second thing the article fails to point out is that Adolphe Sax was also one of the first instrument makers who revolutionized the manufacture of musical instruments because he designed standardized, interchangeable instruments parts. Thus if your a part broke you could replace it without having the part custom crafted and it would fit. Of course this made mass production possible on a scale previously impossible, very useful if the order came in to supply a nations entire army -not every soldier, only the ones that played : )

Finally, Sax also designed lots of other musical instruments such as the Saxhorns.

Last edited by Dan Tong; 02/11/14 02:24 AM.
Dan

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