Practicing what we preach: Elise Hall and a more diverse saxophone performance tradition

Abstract

While the basic facts of Elise Hall’s life and career are known to many saxophonists, they are less well known to a broader public (for example, she is not mentioned in Oxford Music Online, and at the time of writing her Wikipedia entry in English consists of three lines and the names of five men). Additionally, she is primarily considered in reference to the (male) composers of the early twentieth century that she commissioned, rather than in her own right as a performer and commissioner of music for saxophone. Despite being musically and stylistically demanding, Hall’s commissions are sometimes regarded as having insufficient technical difficulty to showcase the instrument or the performer, thus minimizing both their perceived aesthetic value and Hall’s contributions to the repertoire.

By combining the perspectives of a student of saxophone performance and a music history professor, this article aims to analyze Hall and the repertoire that she commissioned through the lens of recent approaches to the decolonization of musicology and analysis. In this context, “decolonization” refers to the dismantling of outmoded aesthetic value systems that effectively marginalized Hall and the music that she performed, due to her gender. We challenge the attitudes that we have met through, on the one hand, finding and performing work that is regarded as “amateur,” and, on the other, putting forward a curriculum that moves beyond the dominant historical narrative of the (dead, white, male) “imaginary museum of musical works” (Goehr 1992). Through critical reflections on student-led artistic learning initiatives, we tackle the implicit and biased notions of “excellence” in higher music education, and examine the implications of a more diverse and balanced performance curriculum.