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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Musical instruments & instrumental ensembles > Wind instruments
In the first fully comprehensive study of one of the world's most
iconic musical instruments, Stephen Cottrell examines the
saxophone's various social, historical, and cultural trajectories,
and illustrates how and why this instrument, with its idiosyncratic
shape and sound, became important for so many different
music-makers around the world. After considering what led inventor
Adolphe Sax to develop this new musical wind instrument, Cottrell
explores changes in saxophone design since the 1840s before
examining the instrument's role in a variety of contexts: in the
military bands that contributed so much to the saxophone's global
dissemination during the nineteenth century; as part of the rapid
expansion of American popular music around the turn of the
twentieth century; in classical and contemporary art music; in
world and popular music; and, of course, in jazz, a musical style
with which the saxophone has become closely identified.
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