Michael Segell

This excerpt comes from Michael Segell’s The Devil’s Horn: The Story of the Saxophone from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool, published in 2005. Segell is an amateur musician and a professional writer and music lover.

When he released A Love Supreme, John Coltrane said that “as long as there is some feeling of communication, it isn’t necessary that it be understood.” But that hasn’t deterred modern music psychologists from trying to tease out which performance and acoustical cues most effectively aid that communication. In the past decade, researchers have conducted more than a hundred studies that explore music’s ability to evoke in the listener the five “basic” emotions—happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and love/tenderness, which appear in musical scores as, respectively, festoso, dolente, furloso, amoroso, and teneramente—or the hundreds of subsets of those emotions. Patrik N. Juslin and Petri Laukka, psychologists at Uppsala University in Sweden, have done meta-analyses of studies examining expressive musical cues, including tempo, sound level, timing, intonation, articulation, timbre, vibrato, tone attacks, tone decays, and pauses. Sadness, they have found, is associated with slow tempo, low sound level, legato articulation, small articulation variability, slow tone attacks, and dull timbre. Happiness is associated with fast tempo, high sound level, staccato articulation, large articulation variability, fast tone attacks, and bright timbre. The combination of cues that is most expressive, according to listeners—and very similar to the combination that evokes sadness and tenderness—includes legato articulation, soft spectrum, slow tempo, high sound level, and slow tone attacks. Sounds that mimicked so-called separation calls—sobs, cries, and moans—were the most poignant of all. Some instruments, obviously, are more capable than others of delivering these cues. Arguably, the saxophone, with the sounds of dozens of instruments tucked into its complex wave form, can deliver almost all of them.

For at least one saxophonist, little distinction exists between the expressive cues he issues on the instrument and the weight and meaning of his words. In fact, the poet Robert Pinsky says, when he plays the saxophone—he has played the horn, semiprofessionally and recreationally, all his life—he’s trying to do the same thing he does when he “fits the words together” in a poem.

“The horn is connected to what I do as a writer because it’s on a completely physical scale and an infinite scale,” says Pinsky, who was poet laureate of the United States between 1997 and 2000. “Theoretically, the cone of a saxophone goes on forever, giving the sounds that come from it an infinite quality. But it’s given its expression by a human. I try to do something with the vowels and consonants of words that makes them musical—infinite—but the medium is my voice, or anybody’s voice who is reading the poem, which means that the medium is inherently on a human scale—on a physical scale, like the saxophone.

“I would trade everything I’ve written if I could play the saxophone the way I want to. If I could sell my soul and just be tremendous, a monster, I’d be a tenor player. But I can’t. I’m not musical enough. The closest I can come to what the saxophone can do is with words.”

(2005)