Tom Holland

If you turned a trumpet on its end with the bell pointing up to the sky and then made it about 30 times bigger, you've got the general shape of an ophiclide.

And so Sax saw this area of the bands and the orchestras as needing attention.

And he therefore looked at the Ophiclid and he experimented with the Ophiclid.

He quite literally took the brass mouthpiece that was on the Offa Clyde and replaced it with a bass clarinet mouthpiece.

That's what we believe he did in the late 1830s.

And the reed mouthpiece would make a smoother, softer sound.

It would make a richer harmonic spectrum.

Now, there are stories that people tried to sabotage Sax's bands.

They bought off some of his instrumentalists.

They tried to find ways in which the saxophones couldn't be played, etc., etc.,

Then it was the turn of the rousing horns of the sax band.

Sax's instruments would have been more homogeneous.

They would have sounded better together, in part because he was making most or all of them.

And so the brass instruments were all made to his specifications.

He added the saxophones in, which would have given more volume to the band.

So clearly volume is an important issue here.

He won the contract to supply the French military with instrumentation for their bands that was more along the lines he wanted.

So for a while then, Saxe's business is booming.

He would have been collecting those instruments because they really represented what he wanted to know about musical instruments.

I think they would have really meant something to him.