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Sigurd Rascher, the distinguished concert saxophonist was born of Swedish and English parentage and spent his childhood in the Swiss Alps. Some of his studies were in Germany, as clarinetist, but he turned early in his musical career to the saxophone and toured Europe with a jazz band from 1927 to 1930. For a time after that he taught school, enjoying association with children in music and woodcrafts. He loved especially his work teaching the small boys and girls to play six-hole flutes, and to carve wooden bowls and boxes. Returning to his profession as an active musician, Rascher entered on his career as a serious and successful saxophone orchestral-soloist and recitalist. Ibert, Glazounov, Milhaud, and Hindemith were among a large number of European composers who wrote music for him and to this general list now has been added or will be added shortly the American names of Roy Harris, Dante Fiorello, Aaron Copland, among others.

It is interesting to note that the daughter of Adolphe Sax, when a very old lady, wrote to Rascher that, after hearing him play, she was convinced the instrument was at last being heard as her father had wished it to be known. - Editor’s Note.

A hundred years seems long in measuring a life span. But in thinking of musical history, a hundred years is not too long. The saxophone, much-maligned, unappreciated, has passed its hundredth year, and only now is beginning to be taken seriously as a musical instrument of artistic and aesthetic possibilities. Only now has the question of its acceptance into orchestral instrumentation come to the front. And even today the musical possibilities of this instrument have not been exploited fully.

In 1842, Berlioz described the saxophone as "... an instrument whose tone color is between that of the brass and the woodwinds. But it even reminds one, thouigh more remotely, of the sound of the strings. I think its main advantage is the greatly varied beauty in its different possibilities of expression. At one time deeply quiet, at another full of emotion; dreamy, melancholic, sometimes with the hush of an echo....I do not know of any instrument having this specific tone-quality, bordering on the limits of the audible." Very few players of this instrument achieve this striking quality described by Berlioz. There are, to be sure, many good saxophonists - especially in this country - but the full capacities of the instrument have not been called upon.

What did Adolphe Sax seek when he invented his instrument in 1840? Did he expect that it would be welcomed into the symphonic orchestra group, or that it would remain almost an outcast for a century? We can leave it to history only to answer these questions. Antoine Joseph Sax (known as Adolphe) perfected the bass clarinet in 1835, when he was only twenty-one years old. In 1840, he was trying to produce a clarinet that would overblow an octave like the flute or oboe, and the result was his new instrument, the saxophone. His aims were definite. He wanted to fill the gap of tone quality between the strings and wind instruments on the one side, and between the brass and woodwinds on the other. Therefore, the new link should have the flexibility of the strings, the power of the brass, and the variety of tone quality of the woodwinds. But in addition the instrument should have a distinct character of its own. Sax was aware that in order to achieve all this in one instrument he must use a single-reed mouthpiece, similar to that of a clarinet, and a conical body of metal. To acquire the necessary flexibility of tone he broadened the mouthpiece outwardly and widened its inner measurements. To make the tone sufficiently voluminous to stand successfully against the brass of the orchestra, the inventor gave the conical body a parabolic shape. These features are mentioned in the patent which Sax took out for the instrument in June, 1846.