Een saxofoonpionier in beeld: het uitvoeren van opdrachtwerken uit de vroege twintigste eeuw aan Sigurd Rascher | AP School Of Arts Skip to main content
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Een saxofoonpionier in beeld: het uitvoeren van opdrachtwerken uit de vroege twintigste eeuw aan Sigurd Rascher

This project studies the phenomenon of dedication in early-20th- century saxophone music in general and the dedicatee’s role in particular. With that focus, I aim to analyze the enduring importance of dedications in music after the 19th century as well as the decisive role of the performer-dedicatee. Sigurd Rascher (1907–2001), a pioneering saxophonist to whom canonized compositions were dedicated, will serve as case study. I have selected a sample of compositions dedicated to this performer as the basis of my research. Concentrating on that corpus, my project first offers a contextual analysis of the background and genesis of the dedications. Next, this contextual study is complemented with a musical analysis of the characteristic features of Rascher’s individual performance style, which I relate systematically to the artistic choices in the dedicated scores. I retrieve these features by analyzing instrumental methods, recordings, and instruments. In a final step, the contextualizing and musical analysis then leads to a historically informed performance in collaboration with the Apotheosis Orchestra. In addition to this artistic output, I aim at developing a paradigm on the performance of dedicated works in the early twentieth century which will be relevant across disciplines.

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