WHEN I WAS A KID, I took trumpet lessons and then played the trumpet in the school band. Sometimes it was a drag. I always had to practice so much so I could be "first, second or third chair." First chair is the best, of course, but I couldn't hang onto it very long, because I didn't practice enough.
Then one day my band instructor said he wanted me to learn how to play the French horn, a large, unwieldy, circular, valved brass instrument with a mellow tone. It was a pain, because I had to learn to do the fingering with the left hand and hold the big horn on my knee. But it was more serene than the trumpet, less likely to make screeching sounds. Its tones were more mature and less threatening.There were only three of us in the horn section. That and the French horn's sheer bulk made me feel more important. I guess my devotion to practice accelerated. I just couldn't afford to embarrass myself during horn solos.
I was thinking of that when I read about the new sax craze, inspired by Lisa Simpson, the brainy, well-behaved, 8-year-old sister of bratty, spiky-haired Bart on the Fox TV show, "The Simpsons." At the beginning of each episode, she breaks into a show-stopping solo that invariably causes her director to lose his cool.
Most interesting: Lisa is a girl playing an unwieldy instrument - one with the mouthpiece of the woodwinds but the metal body and power of the brass. It's usually guys who play the saxophone.
The result of Lisa's example is that girls are taking up the saxophone all over the country. Matt Groening, the creator of "The Simpsons," says his mail often includes photographs of girls holding up their saxophones. There's also an increase in popularity of the saxophone as an instrument of choice, even if it costs twice as much to rent as others.
It's true that whenever there is a steamy, romantic scene in a movie, the music in the background is often the soulful strains of a sax. There is, after all, a jazz resurgence, demonstrated by the recent popularity of Wynton Marsalis or his brother Branford, the former director of "The Tonight Show" band. Better still, there is Bill Clinton, who played a sax on "The Arsenio Hall Show" during the 1992 presidential campaign.
I'd still rather play the French horn, and I would argue that its mellow tones are superior on most occasions to the sax. It's also easier to play. The sax has an inordinate number of keys and calls for an intricate sense of coordination, especially to drain out tons of saliva.
You don't have to be a weight-lifter to play the horn, but it weighs more than most saxophones, even if it's easier to negotiate. Yet the French horn and the saxophone both rank as cumbersome instruments that most people don't know firsthand.
My hope is that this column will generate a resurgence of interest in the French horn - that band and orchestra teachers all over the valley will be swamped with young people who will express burning desires to play it. And who knows, maybe some of them will be looking for an even more unwieldy instrument, like the tuba - a large, oval-shaped instrument a range lower than the French horn.
If that doesn't work, maybe Matt Groening could persuade Lisa Simpson's mom to take up the French horn. I've never seen a woman playing the French horn before, and it would provide a nice balance and end the discrimination against brass instruments in favor of woodwinds. You see, it isn't politically correct to do otherwise.