Sigurd Raschèr

Sigurd Raschèr was born in Elberfeld, Germany (now part of Wuppertal), where his father, Hans August Raschèr (1880–1952), was temporarily stationed as a military physician.

His schooling began in Arlesheim, Switzerland and continued in Stuttgart, Germany, where he graduated from the first Waldorfschule.

This is where he met the composer and conductor Edmund von Borck (1906–1944), who composed a concerto for him in 1932.

Sigurd Manfred Raschèr (pronounced 'Rah-sher'; 15 May 1907 – 25 February 2001) was an American saxophonist born in Germany.

He became an important figure in the development of the 20th century repertoire for the classical saxophone.

After learning piano for some time, he decided to study clarinet with Philipp Dreisbach at the Stuttgart Hochschule für Musik (1928/1929).

In an interview, Raschèr said, "Obeying necessity, not following my inclination, I started to play saxophone in order to be in a dance band. As I did this for a couple of years, I became more and more unsatisfied. I started to practice furiously and slowly found out that it had more possibilities than was usually thought of."

In 1930 Raschèr moved to Berlin.

He was called upon when the Berlin Philharmonic needed a saxophonist for a performance.

Borck's Concerto, Op. 6 for Saxophone and Orchestra, was performed at the General German Composers Festival in Hanover, Germany on 3 October 1932.

It was such a success that the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Eugen Jochum, gave a performance with Raschèr in Berlin on 6 January 1933.

As Hitler rose to power in 1933, Raschèr's friend, Johan Bentzon, whom he had met in Strasbourg, invited him to Copenhagen, Denmark, where Raschèr then taught at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music.

In 1934 he was in Malmö, Sweden.

Over the next four years he performed concerts in Norway, Italy, Spain, Poland, England and Hungary.

In the summer of the same year, Raschèr performed the Borck concerto again in Strasbourg at Hermann Scherchen's International Musician's Working Conference, and in 1935 he performed it with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw under the baton of Eduard van Beinum.

In April 1936 he participated in the XIV Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), premiering the work Concertino da camera by Jacques Ibert.

In 1938 he visited Australia, and in 1939 moved to the United States.

Raschèr arrived in the United States in 1939 and made his American debut on 20 October 1939 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky.

On 11 November 1939 he was a featured soloist at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Sir John Barbirolli.

He was the first saxophonist to appear as a soloist in a subscription concert with both orchestras.

His career continued with solo appearances in Washington, D.C. and at New York City's Town Hall in the spring of 1940, which Arturo Toscanini attended and thereupon embraced Raschèr.

Due to the war in Europe, he could not return to Germany.

Although he was born in Germany, publicity from the 1940s often refers to Raschèr as having come from Sweden.

This reflected both his distaste for the Hitler regime, and reaction to American suspicion during that time of all things German.

His international career as a soloist and his ability to gain residence and citizenship in many countries could have been damaged or destroyed if any suspicion arose about his background.

On 4 November 1941, his wife Ann Mari, of Swedish descent, joined him in the United States where they established their home on a small farm in the rural town of Shushan in northern New York State, where they would reside for nearly 60 years.

After World War II ended in 1945, Raschèr was invited to give concerts in Europe again, where he traveled for months on end, performing as soloist with many orchestras.

As Raschèr's reputation grew in the United States, he also performed many orchestra concerts as soloist as well as with various university bands.

Raschèr performed as soloist with more than 250 orchestras and wind ensembles worldwide, including concerts in Europe, Asia, Australia, Canada and the United States.

With his daughter Carina, Linda Bangs and Bruce Weinberger, Raschèr founded the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet in 1969, one of the first classical saxophone ensembles to perform worldwide.

He remained with the quartet for its first ten years, during which it performed at major concert halls in Europe and the United States.

The quartet was acclaimed by the Wiener Zeitung as the "Uncrowned Kings of the Saxophone".

The quartet performed in all the countries of Europe, as well as North America, Southeast Asia, and Australia.

It is the longest existing saxophone quartet.

His last saxophone solo performance was playing the Glazunov concerto for saxophone and string orchestra with the Vermont Symphony in 1977, on the eve of his 70th birthday.

After suffering a debilitating stroke in 1994, Raschèr died in 2001 at age 93 in Shushan, New York.

The Sigurd Raschèr Special Collections Archive is currently held at the State University of New York at Fredonia.

During Raschèr's life, 208 works for saxophone were dedicated to him, many counted as among the most important 20th century works for the concert saxophone.

"Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, a preponderance of the significant new saxophone solo and chamber repertoire would appear with the familiar dedication to Sigurd M. Raschèr, the outcome of not just his ongoing commitment to motivate some of the world's finest composers, but also in part the result of genuine close friendships he developed with so many. Among them were Larsson, Glaser, and von Koch in Sweden; Jacobi, Dressel, von Knorr and Hindemith in Germany; Haba, Macha, and Reiner in Czechoslovakia; and Benson, Brant, Cowell, Dahl, Erickson, Husa, Hartley and Wirth in the United States. And it is not without significance that among all the pieces written for and dedicated to him during his life, not one was commissioned. He inspired new music, he never needed to purchase it."

Works dedicated to Raschèr include: