In Les Rites de Passage (1909), ethnographer Arnold van Gennep coined three phases of a rite of passage: the preliminaire, the liminaire, and the post-liminaire. The liminaire phase, derived from the Latin limes (threshold), describes life at the margins: a place of ambiguity, or as anthropologist Victor Turner described in The Ritual Process (1969), ‘betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony’.

In many ways, liminaire aptly describes the saxophone’s place in music, culture, and society: it is often found at the periphery of orchestras and bands, or otherwise reduced to a narrow popular stereotype. The strictures of this frame, and wealth of evidence to the contrary, animated Ross’ award-winning PhD exploring the early history of the saxophone in Australia, which analysed its reception from the gold rush to the Jazz Age and beyond (2023).