Anneke Scott performs the opening of Joseph Forestier's Air Varié for alto saxhorn

Описание: Here's my latest addition to the ever increasing collection of fortnightly videos as part of my #CornoNotCorona project. You can learn more about this instrument and the music here:    • Anneke Scott on Courtois Saxhorns and Jose...  

I included my Distin Ventilhorn a few weeks back and have returned to a similar instrument this week. This actually doesn’t belong to me but has been on long term loan from Jeremy Montagu, who sadly died last year. If memory serves me correctly Jeremy told me that he swapped something else in his collection with another collector in order to obtain this instrument and I think he must have certainly gotten a good deal. This is a Courtois saxhorn and it comes in a very typical little black wooden box with a selection of crooks and mouthpieces.

This instrument has various medals from Paris Exposition Universelle’s of 1855 and 1867 the Great London Exposition of 1862. It’s made by Antoine Courtois but was sold in London by Arthur Chappell. The name saxhorn comes from its inventor Adolphe Sax, famous for another instrument - the family of saxophones. And the concept is in many ways similar. With the saxhorn family Sax created a family of brass instruments in which all the different instruments are basically the same design, just smaller or larger and therefore higher or lower in pitch. This is very unlike the modern day symphonic brass family of trumpets, horns, trombones and tubas - all of which are really fundamentally different in design, yes they are all sounded by buzzing our lips faster or slower into a mouthpiece, and they’re all made out of brass some are conical, some are cylindrical, some may have rotary or piston valves, others slides. The concept of the family of saxhorns and saxophones are closer to the older idea of a consort of recorders or viols.

One still can find saxhorns being played today in modern brass bands - this instrument is basically the grandfather of the modern day tenor horn. One thing that is a bit of a tricky issue is exactly what each “size” of instrument is called. I mentioned tenor horn just now, on the bell it says “alto” and the pitches of F, Eb and Db. The instrument actually comes with more crooks than that. Alto is what French musicians would normally call this instrument but there is a lot of fluctuation even within geographical schools so you have to have your wits about you when discussing these instruments.

This week I’m playing a section of a solo by Joseph Forestier. Forestier was famous as a cornet player but started as a horn player training with Dauprat at the Paris Conservatoire in the early 1830s. This might seem a bit odd today as cornet players are more frequently trumpeters and vice versa but when the cornet and saxhorns emerged in the mid 19th century cornets were most often played by musicians who had initially trained as horn players. Forestier became solo cornet for the Théâtre Italien and the Paris Opera and was a notable teacher. This week I’m performing part of his third Air varié for cornet which was also published in a version for saxhorn in E flat. https://imslp.org/wiki/Air_varié_No.3...)

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