Saxophone baryton adolphe sax biography
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Today in History: Death of Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone
On this day, 7 February , the Belgian inventor of the saxophone, Adolphe Sax, died of pneumonia in Paris, afflicted by poverty.
Adolphe Sax was born in the Walloon city of Dinant on 6 November His father, Charles-Joseph Sax, was a skilled musical instrument maker who owned a family business, which greatly helped Adolphe develop his trade.
However, the story could have been very different and the saxophone very nearly never saw the light of day. During childhood, Adolphe suffered a staggering number of near-death experiences – his neighbours referred to him as "little Sax, little ghost."
As a toddler, he fell three floors hitting his head against a stone and was believed dead. At the age of three, he drank an entire bowl of acidic water. If that wasn't enough, he was seriously burned in a gunpowder explosion, while also having survived poisoning and asphyxiation – three times – due to varnished items in hi
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Adolphe Sax’s E-flat baritone saxophone
The Léon Courtin-Marcelle Bouché Fund, managed by the King Baudouin Foundation, has recently acquired a baritone saxophone in E-flat. This type of saxophone developed rapidly after Adolphe Sax’s first trials with the bass saxophone.
The instrument is dated and carries the series number It is the oldest saxophone recorded of any sizes of the instrument.
The stamp on the bell of the instrument indicates that the saxophone was patented, so it was probably produced after 21 March , the date on which Adolphe Sax registered a patent for “a system of wind instruments, called saxophones”.
Born in Dinant in , Antoine-Joseph (known as Adolphe) Sax trained whilst he was a young man to make musical instruments in his father’s workshop. He went to live in Paris shortly before and created a workshop there for woodwind and brass instruments. Thanks to his highly creative nature, Sax made a large number of instruments there. The saxophone was just one of
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The invention of the saxophone by the great Adolphe Sax
The new saxophone of Adolphe Sax had a bore with a parabolic cone and a mouthpiece with a simple reed which, bygd making it smaller, had just been adapted into the body of the instrument. However, he did not content himself with just inventing the saxophone, nor did he begränsa himself to only one instrument. He was always interested in developing a broader family, generally from six to seven members. His goal was to cover the largest number of registers and to encourage the incorporation of his instruments within orchestras. In , he filed patents for a collection of six valved horns –better known as the saxhorns–, while in he patented sju designs for a class of instruments known as the saxtrombas. This was followed, in , bygd his submission for patent of a full range of saxophones including eight members, and then, in , the family of the saxtubas. In total, Adolphe Sax patented 46 inventions.