Word: instrument
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Only a child that familiar with adversity, contend critics of the saxophone, could have foisted such a contraption on an unsuspecting world. A hybrid of the brass and woodwind families, the instrument is the perennial Cinderella of serious music. Its rich, sometimes dozing sound has never found a permanent place in the symphony orchestra, although after its invention in 1840 such French composers as Berlioz and Massenet experimented with it. In Germany only Richard Strauss, whose Domestic Symphony included a quartet of saxes, regarded it as anything but a yeoman of military bands...
...Toronto, 400 players from North America, Europe and the Far East gathered recently for the third World Saxophone Congress. The aim of the congress was to win a chair for the sax in the orchestra and to encourage composers to write more and better solo music for the instrument...
...French Virtuoso Jean-Marie Londeix wailed into some high, American-style leaps during the premiere of Fellow Countryman Guy Lacour's Hommage à Jacques Ibert, thereby precipitating excited talk of a possible fusion between the French school of playing (bright, full tone, strict adherence to the instrument's normal 2½-octave range) and the American (more jazz-influenced, less inhibited in tone and pitch...
...play Bach's Klavierubung until then." As an afterthought he added, "Come on down front so you'll be nearer the music." Hundreds did, sitting in front of the stage and in the aisles while Newman's hands and feet flew over his instrument's quadruple keyboard and pedals...
...very seriously -except, of course, by Oscar. His classical composition had a sweet, derivative aura, reminiscent of movie scores. (He wrote several, including a mini-opera for Charlie Chan at the Opera.) His pianistic enthusiasm was showy but, except for Gershwin's music, Levant tended to pound the instrument like the back of an old crony...