2. Marching Toward the Middlebrow
Saxophonists on the colonial-era Australian stage, military and civic bands, the Sousa Band’s influential 1911 visit featuring saxophonic repertoire, and cultural exchanges of the Great War.
Saxophonic exploits from industrious Sydney musician, bandleader, publican and freemason Sebastian Hodge regaled Sydney’s stages from 1879 to 1889. This melody was Hodge’s signature piece, often followed by spoken remarks and musical variations, and left enough of an impression to be recalled in the local press as late as 1925.
Recorded at Medley Hall, Carlton.
Piano: Jesika Clark.
Michael William Balfe, ‘The Heart Bowed Down’ from The Bohemian Girl (1843)
All-brass bands on the British example largely excluded the saxophone, however professional concert bands in the United States – originally influenced by French military bands – provided a sectional platform for the instrument and its exponents. The Federal March (Dedicated to the Australasians), originally titled Golden Fleece, was composed for the antipodean legs of the Sousa Band’s 1910-11 world tour, and is here performed at a customarily sprightly tempo.
Recorded at Newman Hall, Defence Force School of Music, Yallambie.
Conductor: Adam Matthews.
John Philip Sousa, The Federal March (Dedicated to the Australasians), 1910
The Prélude from George Bizet’s L’Arlésienne Suite no. 1 is a rare early example of saxophone repertoire from the art music performing canon heard in Australia. It was scored for concert band and performed by the fifty-three-strong Sousa Band in Sydney in May 1911.
Recorded at Newman Hall, Defence Force School of Music, Yallambie.
Conductor: Adam Matthews.
Georges Bizet, L’Arlésienne Suite no. 1, Prélude (1872)
On the Sousa Band’s arrival in Melbourne, a mass of local bands marched them from Spencer Street Station to the Town Hall to the strains of Alex Lithgow’s Invercargill.
The liminality of the saxophone in Australia at the time is illustrated through Lithgow, the Launceston-based ‘Sousa of the Antipodes’, who composed Invercargill in 1908 with all-brass and mixed (including reeds) bands in mind. Saxophones did not appear in the scores or parts published by his Commonwealth Music Publishing company.
Recordings of Invercargill broke phonograph sales records, leading it to it being scored for bands – including a saxophone section – courtesy of Louis-Philippe Laurendeau for New York publishing house Carl Fischer in 1913. The tune’s ubiquity was such that ANZAC troops were known to hum it at Gallipoli. Moreover, by combining popular appeal and mass media, Invercargill’s prominence foreshadows the popular modernity of the Jazz Age that would follow, and define the saxophone anew.
Recorded at Newman Hall, Defence Force School of Music, Yallambie.
Conductor: Adam Matthews.