Sarrusophone: The Metal Double-Reed Family Built to Outshout the Oboe

Overview

The sarrusophones are a family of metal double-reed conical-bore woodwind instruments patented and first manufactured by the French instrument maker Pierre-Louis Gautrot in 1856. They were named after the French military bandmaster Pierre-Auguste Sarrus (1813–1876), whom Gautrot credited with the concept of the instrument — although it is not entirely clear whether Sarrus benefited financially from the arrangement. The whole family was intended for military bands, as outdoor-capable replacements for the oboe and bassoon, which at the time lacked the carrying power required for marching music. Although originally designed as double-reed instruments throughout the family, single-reed mouthpieces were later developed for use with the larger bass and contrabass sarrusophones.

The sarrusophone occupies an unusual place in the wind family tree. Acoustically it is a double-reed instrument with a conical metal bore — closer in principle to the oboe and bassoon than to the saxophone — but its key work and fingering are nearly identical to the saxophone’s, and the larger family members in particular look like a saxophone with a double-reed crook. This combination of features made it a logical choice for nineteenth-century military and concert bands looking for double-reed colors at outdoor volume, but it also placed the instrument in an awkward middle ground that no single existing playing community fully claimed.

Origin and History

The sarrusophone was patented by Gautrot in Paris in 1856 and went into production within a few years. Its design problem was a familiar one for nineteenth-century French military music: the standard double-reed instruments could not project in outdoor settings, and the new single-reed saxophone (patented by Adolphe Sax just over a decade earlier) was filling the gap with a single-reed timbre. Gautrot’s solution was to take the saxophone’s general body shape and key layout but mount a double reed on a metal bocal at the top, producing a reedier, more penetrating tone that could play oboe-like and bassoon-like parts at marching-band volume.

The fingering similarity to the saxophone produced an immediate legal conflict: Adolphe Sax filed and lost at least one infringement lawsuit against Gautrot, with the court ruling that the tone produced by the two instrument families is markedly different even though their mechanisms are mechanically similar. The sarrusophone never gained the wide acceptance the saxophone did, however, so makers had little incentive to develop its mechanism to the same level of refinement. Saxophone key work continued to advance — articulated G-sharp, bis B-flat, F-sharp trill keys, palm keys, automatic octave keys — while sarrusophone key work largely froze in its earlier nineteenth-century state.

Production was concentrated in France and Italy. Gautrot and his successor Couesnon were the principal makers, joined by Buffet (under the ownership of Evette & Schaeffer), the Orsi Instrument Company in Italy, and Rampone (later Rampone & Cazzani). In the United States, C.G. Conn began manufacturing the EE-flat contrabass sarrusophone in 1921, primarily for the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps; Conn made about 300 contrabass sarrusophones in total, about half of them for the military, with production continuing into the mid-1930s. The John Philip Sousa band used Conn sarrusophones for an unknown period beginning in 1921. By the late 1930s, however, production had effectively ended worldwide, and the instrument has not been put back into series production by any major maker since.

Construction and Materials

All members of the sarrusophone family are made of metal, with a conical bore. The larger family members in particular resemble the ophicleide in their general shape, with a long folded body and a flared upturned bell. Like the oboe and bassoon, all sizes were originally designed for a double reed, mounted on a metal bocal that inserts into the body. Approximate reed measurements (tip width, distance from tip to first wire, overall length, in millimetres) for the main sizes are: soprano 9 / 20 / 50, alto 13 / 25 / 55, tenor 15 / 27 / 60, baritone 17 / 32 / 70, bass 19 / 40 / 80, and contrabass in E-flat or C 22 / 44 / 85.

Single-reed mouthpieces were later developed that resemble alto or soprano saxophone mouthpieces. It is unclear whether single-reed mouthpieces were available for every size of sarrusophone; the most common surviving examples are for the EE-flat contrabass. The single-reed option made the larger instruments noticeably easier to play for musicians with no double-reed background, which probably explains its survival in jazz and rock contexts (where most players came from a saxophone or clarinet background, not from oboe or bassoon).

The fingering and key work were modelled directly on the saxophone, with several distinctive differences. Sarrusophones use non-automatic octave keys (typically two for sopranino through bass, and three for the contrabasses, with the third key dedicated to the notes D and E-flat directly above the octave break). They lack articulated G-sharp, bis B-flat, F-sharp trill keys, and the 1/1 and 1/2 B-flat keys of the saxophone. The top and bottom key stacks are not linked. The low B-flat is operated by the left thumb rather than the left little finger. There is a key for rapid alternation across the C-D break, which can also be used to play high D, broadly equivalent in function to the saxophone’s high D palm key. Palm keys for the upper register are absent because the non-automatic register keys give easy access to third harmonics.

Sizes and Ranges

The sarrusophone family was manufactured in the following sizes and theoretical ranges:

• E-flat sopranino, written B-flat to G (sounding D-flat 4 to B-flat 6)
• B-flat soprano, written B-flat to G (sounding A-flat 3 to F 6)
• E-flat alto, written G to G (sounding B-flat 2 to B-flat 5)
• B-flat tenor, written B-flat to G (sounding A-flat 2 to F 5)
• E-flat baritone, written G to G (sounding B-flat 1 to B-flat 4)
• B-flat bass, written B-flat to G (sounding A-flat 1 to F 4)
• EE-flat contrabass, written B-flat to G (sounding D-flat 1 to B-flat 3)
• CC contrabass, written B-flat to G (sounding B-flat 0 to G 3)
• BB-flat contrabass, written B-flat to G (sounding A-flat 0 to F 3)

All sarrusophones are transposing instruments notated in treble clef, except the CC contrabass, which is notated in bass clef and sounds an octave lower (like the contrabassoon). The written range — lowest written B-flat just below middle C, with practical extension up to high G6 — is essentially identical to the saxophone’s, and some sarrusophones have extra keys to extend the bottom of the range to a low G.

Until the turn of the twenty-first century, the BB-flat contrabass had the distinguishing feature of being the lowest-pitched reed instrument ever placed in production: it can produce a low A-flat 0, one semitone below A0, which is the lowest note of both the piano and a contrabassoon with a low-A key. Both the B-flat subcontrabass saxophone (first built in 2010) and the Eppelsheim B-flat tubax (introduced about a decade earlier) have since matched this with A-flat 0 as their lowest pitch. Leblanc’s prototype subcontrabass clarinets of the 1930s went even lower — the E-flat octocontralto to E-flat 0 and the B-flat octocontrabass to C0 — but neither model went into production, and the prototypes survive at the Leblanc Musée des instruments à vent in France.

Playing Technique

A sarrusophone player needs both saxophone-like dexterity (because the key work is essentially saxophone key work) and double-reed control (because the reed is fundamentally an oboe or bassoon reed enlarged). This combination is one reason the instrument never developed a deep playing community: the natural pool of recruits would have been double-reed players, but they had to retrain on saxophone-style fingerings, and the natural pool of saxophonists found themselves wrestling with a much larger and harder-to-control double reed than they were used to. Single-reed mouthpieces partially solved the second problem for the contrabass, but at the cost of making the instrument acoustically closer to a saxophone and further weakening its claim to be a true oboe-and-bassoon replacement.

Once the technique is in hand, however, the sarrusophone is a flexible and powerful instrument with a wide dynamic range. Its tone is described in the literature as less clear but much reedier than the saxophone — humorously, “industrial” or “unrefined.” This reedy quality is precisely what gives the contrabass sarrusophone its distinctive presence in turn-of-the-twentieth-century French orchestral writing, where it is often used to add bite and projection to the bottom of the woodwind section.

Cultural Context

In orchestral music, the sarrusophone enjoyed its greatest popularity around the turn of the twentieth century, mostly in France, where the EE-flat and CC contrabass sarrusophones were used as substitutes for the contrabassoon. Composers who wrote contrabass sarrusophone parts include Jules Massenet (Esclarmonde, Visions, Suite parnassienne), Maurice Ravel (the Shéhérazade overture, Rapsodie espagnole, L’heure espagnole), Ignacy Jan Paderewski (Symphony in B minor “Polonia,” which calls for three sarrusophones), Frederick Delius (Requiem, Songs of Sunset), Claude Debussy (Jeux), Lili Boulanger (Psalms 129 and 130), Arrigo Boito (Nerone), Igor Stravinsky (Threni), and Paul Dukas (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 1897, where the contrabass sarrusophone is used to memorable effect). Today these parts are usually played on the contrabassoon, although early-twentieth-century recordings preserve genuine sarrusophone performances of some of them. The English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji also called for contrabass sarrusophone in several of his orchestral works.

In the concert band literature, Percy Grainger used the EE-flat contrabass in the original scoring of his Children’s March: Over the Hills and Far Away. Italian band scores in the early twentieth century commonly include parts for B-flat tenor, E-flat baritone, B-flat bass, and contrabass sarrusophones; the sopranino E-flat sarrusophone (and its distant cousin the high E-flat oboe) is rare even by sarrusophone standards. Sir Thomas Beecham had to import French players to perform Josef Holbrooke’s Apollo and the Seaman in 1908 because the sarrusophone parts could not be covered locally. The Conn EE-flat contrabass became a fixture of U.S. military bands beginning in 1921 and was used by the John Philip Sousa band shortly thereafter.

In jazz, the sarrusophone is a curiosity. The most famous example is the 1924 Clarence Williams Blue 5 recording of “Mandy, Make Up Your Mind,” with sarrusophone played by the soprano-saxophone and clarinet virtuoso Sidney Bechet (who later denied having played the instrument). A soprano sarrusophone is heard in the song “Humpty-Dumpty Heart” played by Kay Kyser’s band in the 1941 film Playmates. In the 1970s and 1980s the American jazz musician Gerald Oshita played avant-garde jazz on a Conn EE-flat contrabass; later sarrusophone recordings have been made by saxophonists Scott Robinson, Lenny Pickett, James Carter, and Paul Winter. In rock music, They Might Be Giants used sarrusophone on the song “Older” from their album Mink Car. Frank Zappa used the EE-flat contrabass sarrusophone in scores including “Think It Over,” “Big Swifty,” “The Adventures of Greggery Peccary,” “Waka/Jawaka,” and others, with Earl Dumler as the player.

Notable Examples and Modern Use

Today the sarrusophone is used in a handful of symphonic wind ensembles and as a novelty instrument; there are also a small but devoted body of amateur players, mostly of the EE-flat contrabass. The instrument has occasional film-music outings — Bruce Broughton made extensive use of a contrabass sarrusophone in his score for the film Tombstone (1993). Important museum collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (which holds the bass, baritone, tenor, alto, and soprano set shown in the photograph that accompanies this article) and the Museu de la Música de Barcelona.

A sister instrument, the rothphone (also rothophone or saxarrusophone), is a sarrusophone hybrid rewrapped into the shape of a saxophone, introduced in Italy around 1900. It was intended to replace oboes and bassoons in military bands but found little acceptance and remained essentially unknown outside Italy. It was built in sizes from soprano to bass, with narrower, less tapered conical bores than either saxophones or sarrusophones. Buescher imported a number of rothphones to the United States during the late 1920s or early 1930s.

Comparison with Related Instruments

Compared with the saxophone, the sarrusophone shares the conical metal bore, the general key layout, and (broadly) the written range, but uses a double reed rather than a single reed and produces a much reedier, more “industrial” tone. Compared with the oboe and bassoon, the sarrusophone is louder and more outdoor-capable but lacks the refined timbre, expressive range, and accumulated repertoire that keep those instruments at the centre of the orchestral wind section. Compared with the clarinet family — which produced its own answer to the low-register problem in the form of the contrabass clarinet — the sarrusophone is generally heavier, louder, and reedier, and (until recently) capable of going lower in absolute pitch than any production clarinet ever made.

The instrument also belongs to the broader nineteenth-century lineage of metal-bodied wind instruments designed for military and band use that also includes the trumpet family’s later valve-driven offshoots and the saxhorn family. In all of these the basic project is the same — to take a wind-instrument tradition rooted in indoor classical music and re-engineer it for outdoor projection in a band setting. Among these projects the saxophone succeeded outright; the saxhorn succeeded partially; the sarrusophone, despite its acoustic distinctiveness, never quite found a stable musical home.