The first saxophonist to give a New York Town Hall recital and one of the earliest to appear as a soloist with a major American symphony orchestra, Dr. Cecil Leeson devoted his life to promoting the saxophone as an instrument capable of serious musical expression. Leeson was born in Cando, North Dakota, in December 1902 and,. although he didn't begin playing the saxophone until age seventeen, he nevertheless enrolled at Dana's Musical Institute in Warren, Ohio, in September 1921 as a saxophone major. With his enrollment in that year, he initiated a career as a concert soloist on an instrument previously associated primarily with concert and military bands, vaudeville, and the emerging jazz movement. Although performers such as Elise Hall of the Boston Orchestral Society, Jascha Guu ehich, H. Benne Henton, Tom Brown and the Six Brown Brothers, and Rudy Wiedoeft made tremendous gains in popularizing the saxophone in this country, when Leeson began musical study at Dana's Institute, the saxophone could claim no serious concert performers, no stylistic or tonal traditions on which to build, and no concert repertory.The purpose of this dissertation was to document the circumstances of the formative years of the concert saxophone in America, beginning in 1921 with Leeson's enrollment in Dana's Musical Institute and ending in 11941 with the commission of the Paul Creston Concerto. This marked what Leeson saw as the completion of a body of literature for the saxophone comprising works in the most important musical categories: sonatas, concertos, quartets, and saxophone with string quartet. The dissertation serves as a source of original research concerning the literature commissioned and performed by him between 1921 and 1941; it concludes with an epilogue containing a brief account of Leeson's activities from 1941 up to the time of his death in 1989. The source of this material was interviews conducted between the author and Cecil Leeson between 1981 and 1988 supported, whenever possible, with information taken from newspaper articles, essays, programs, and other published documents. Transcripts of interviews are included in the appendix. / School of Music