This is a comprehensive introduction to the art of playing recorder sonatas, written by a teacher and player of wide experience. It is designed not only for students and teachers, but also for those self-taught recorder players who have reached the point where they feel ready to embark upon solo sonata playing. It aims to encourage players whose experience has been limited to consort music to extend their playing to sonatas by Handel, Telemann, and others, so increasing their enjoyment and skill in recorder playing in all its varied forms. Through this book they will encounter sonatas from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries, which often make challenging demands upon the recorder's expressive capabilities. Each of the sonatas considered is described in relation to its musical background (illustrated by parallels with other arts) and to the performance practices of each period.

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.