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

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Pierre-Philippe Bauzin (1933-2005) was a skilled keyboard performer, improviser, and composer. By way of his close personal friendship with renowned saxophonist Jean-Marie Londeix, Bauzin began dedicating, composing, and often times performing music for saxophone with Londeix, beginning in 1959. The results of this friendship produced eleven original works for saxophone with diverse instrumentation, ranging from solo compositions to large ensembles. Due to Bauzin's preference for improvising the piano accompaniments of his music on each performance, however, a majority of his compositions were thought to be incomplete or lost. This study surveys Bauzin's complete opus for saxophone by way of both his published works, and the author's rediscovery of the manuscripts to these previously assumed lost compositions for saxophone. The pieces studied are Sonata no. 1 (1959), Poème (1960), Cinq Pièces Breves en Forme de Musique (1960), Esquisses (1967), Divertimento (1968), and Quatuor no. 1 (1962). In addition, chapter 8 provides information regarding other compositions for saxophone by Bauzin that did not survive in their completed form. The survey of each work contains information pertaining to creation, performances of significance in saxophone history, and compositional techniques present within each work that can be used to identify the components of Bauzin's unique compositional style.