Marcel Mule Remembered
By Marshall Taylor
Back in the mid 1950s, when I was a high school saxophonist, there were fewer than half a dozen long-playing records available of concert music for saxophone, at least that I could find in local record shops or advertised in music periodicals. I still have four of them today. Sigurd Rascher Plays the Saxophone was one; it was a collection of shorter pieces for alto and piano, including Pierre Lantier's Sicilienne, which I learned to play by ear from hearing the record. I remember that when I chanced on a copy of the published music in a practice room a few years later I was fascinated to see it written out. It hadn't occurred to me that such music was published and that one could go out and buy it! There was a also recording of the Paul Creston Sonata with Vincent Abato playing saxophone and the composer playing piano, and later, when I was studying saxophone at Wheaton College near Chicago, I went to Northwestern University in nearby Evanston to hear Cecil Leeson, then on the faculty there and the dedicatee of the same sonata, play the work in what was probably one of his last recitals. I remember being somewhat startled when he came out on stage and proceeded to practice several of the harder passages, including the high G in the first movement!

But the recordings that really thrilled me were a series of LPs on London Records called, simply, The Saxophone. The covers were beautiful: yellow designs on a vivid red background, yellow and black type along with black and white photographs of the artists. Who were these elegantly dressed gentlemen, poised and dignified and holding saxophones? I found two volumes before they disappeared forever: Volume 5 was the Quatuor de Saxophones Marcel Mule playing three harpsichord pieces by Scarlatti, Tchaikovsky's Andante Cantabile from his first String Quartet, a Schumann Scherzo, Albéniz Sévilla, and three movements from the Glazounov Saxophone Quartet.

Volume 6 was Marcel Mule, saxophone and Solange Robin, piano, playing Pierre Lantier's Sicilienne, the Creston Sonata, Paule Maurice's Tableaux de Provence, and four unaccompanied études-caprices by Amable Massis, all of which provided an opportunity to hear Mule's flowing legato tone, supple phrasing, casually virtuosic technique over the entire instrument (the sound always staying relaxed and free), crisp, clean staccato, expressive vibrato, faultless intonation, and a dynamic control that could effortlessly move from a vibrant, fortissimo high F to a whispering, pianissimo low B flat. Most of all, I was impressed by the very vivid and compelling aliveness to the playing, the nobility and richness of the sound.

What a sound and what marvelous playing! My life was set on a new course by those recordings. I nearly wore them out; I slowed them down to half speed to study how Mule used his vibrato; I memorized and performed the music in concert; I sought out teachers who admired Mule and the French woodwind tradition - first Russell Platz at Wheaton College, a remarkable teacher who gave me a solid foundation in music, and then, for a masters degree, the great saxophonist and teacher Fred Hemke, who had taken his Premier Prix in Mule's saxophone class in Paris and was then just beginning his long tenure on the faculty of Northwestern University.

Finally, I won a Fulbright grant (and Mule's approval) to go over and study with the man myself for two years in Paris, the culmination of that rich period in my musical life. Marcel Mule was already a legend when I was beginning to play, and he is even more of a legend today.

Fashions and taste in saxophone playing change, but Mule was first of all a great musician, then a great saxophonist. You can hear in those recordings a very advanced and masterful concept of musical time and phrasing. He floats through the phrases and over the bar lines as if he is inventing the music on the spot. Listen to that andante cantabile movement of the Tchaikovsky first String Quartet, if you're lucky enough to have access to a copy of the recording. Have you ever heard a violinist play it as beautifully, as expressively, as freely, as intuitively and instinctively right?

To backtrack just a bit, while I was still in high school, Mule had come to the United States and played a series of concerts with the Boston Symphony under Charles Munch, performing the Ibert Concertino da Camera and the Tomasi Ballade. I heard (and audio-taped) a television broadcast of one of the concerts which aired in the Chicago area. He also gave a clinic at Selmer headquarters in Elkhart, Indiana.

Thus, when I got that letter from the Fulbright Commission telling me I had received a grant to Paris to study saxophone with the master saxophonist for a year, you can imagine my feelings. That was near the very end of the days of luxury transatlantic steamship travel and Fulbright grantees sailed to France on board the steamship Le France.

The five days of incredibly delicious French meals (Craig Claiborn once called the first-class dining room on board Le France the best French restaurant in the world), the bilingual signs and announcements, first in French, then in English, all were a perfect immersion in the French culture and language as preparation for a year in Paris. And what a city Paris was and is! Notre Dame, Les Halles, soupe à l'oignon, the architecture, the cosmopolitan atmosphere that drew people from all over the world. What a marvelous place to be! I remember taking the métro across Paris to my first saxophone class in the old Conservatoire on Rue de Madrid, up the hill behind Gare St. Lazare. I came in near the end of class that first day because Mule had arranged for me to play for him after class. The main thing I remember about that first lesson was Mule talking about playing up and down the horn without moving the jaw. He suggested playing arpeggios over the full range of the horn in front of a mirror while avoiding any jaw movement. I could see that this was one of the secrets of the French saxophonists' fluency and evenness of sound from the bottom to the top of the horn, and I worked hard to learn to do it right.

Because I was too old by a few months to be an official member of the class and compete for the Premier Prix at the end of the year, it was decided that I would audit the classes but have private lessons in Mule's home. I had a lesson every two weeks which lasted at least two hours and I was expected to prepare, in addition to all the major and minor scales and arpeggios, an open-end assignment, perhaps four to six etudes, in each of two etude books (Ferling being one of them - Mule called it "the saxophonist's bible"), plus at least two major works, a sonata and a concerto, for each lesson! When I became frustrated with not being able to perfect the pieces in that amount of time and proposed to Mule that we move more slowly, he adamantly refused. "We have only a short time to work together and I want to cover a lot of literature," he said. "You can always go back to these pieces later and work them up to performance level."

I eventually found my own solution, though it involved more work: while continuing to learn new repertoire for my lessons, I began to schedule recitals every few months at some of the student houses of the Cité Universitaire where I was living, at which I would play the repertoire we had worked on earlier in lessons.

Among the pieces I played was Pierre Lantier's Euskaldunak, then unpublished. Having heard Mule's recording of it and admired it, I borrowed the music from him, copied it, and extracted the saxophone part. Since the composer was kind enough to come to the concert, I played his Sicilienne as an encore and asked him to inscribe my copy of the music.

I later corresponded with his wife, the composer Paule Maurice, concerning the very beautiful suite of pictures of her native Provence, the Tableaux de Provence. Lantier was also from the south of France, but from the Basque region near Spain (euskaldunak is a Basque word). Lantier and Maurice had become friends with the Mules (and the music was, of course, written for and performed first by Mule), and both couples spent their summer vacations in the small town of Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Riviera near Toulon, where the Mules eventually bought a villa, to which they retired shortly after my Paris study days and where I later visited them several times.

Mule had the habit of initialing an "M" at the end of études after he had heard them played at a lesson. Ferling, as I've mentioned, was the ultimate test, and it was a revelation to hear Mule play those études. I would work on them assiduously in preparation for a lesson, only to hear him play them with an such an easy command, such a beautiful singing tone and absolute rhythmic precision that I despaired of ever sounding that good. Finally one day, when I finished played one of the slow studies, I heard him simply say, "Parfait!" (Perfect!).

I should add, however, that, in looking at my edition (which now needs to be rebound), I see that in the last few difficult, rapid études at the end of the book, the enharmonic ones which Mule had written to supplement Ferling's original "48," the "M" is missing! I now realize that he must have been particularly interested to hear students play these studies, which he had written and that my lack of fluency in them was probably a disappointment. Now, of course, I can enjoy and appreciate these beautiful etudes in the A flat and E flat minor, G flat and C sharp major, which, though closely modeled on the original Ferling studies, also reveal a particular subtlety of phrasing and melodic inventiveness.

As a student in Paris, I was also studying French for about four or five hours a day in classes at the Institut de Professeurs de Français à l'Étranger, a part of the Sorbonne, because Mule had told me, "I'm an old man and it's tiring for me to speak English, so please hurry up and learn French!"

One day, after a few months of lessons and of French classes, I arrived at his apartment for a lesson an hour earlier than he was expecting me; there had been a mix up in the lesson time. He was just finishing lunch and invited me in to sit with him while he had a cup of coffee and a cigar. I greeted Madame Mule and, noticing that she wasn't taking part in our English conversation, asked her if she spoke English. She said no, she didn't, and, out of courtesy to her, I switched over to my rather perfunctory French. It must have been at least adequate enough for communication, though considerably less than elegant. That afternoon, when we finished our coffee and began the lesson, Mule continued to speak French, and indeed, from then on never spoke English to me unless a word came up which I didn't understand. If he didn't know the English equivalent he would simply look it up in his pocket dictionary.

Perhaps my being an American, being a bit older that the other students, and being a private student whom he taught in his home all may have contributed to putting our relationship on a somewhat different footing than if I had been in the class at the Conservatoire. Maybe because he knew of my interest in the quartet and my acquaintance with their recordings, he invited me to one of their rehearsals a month or two after we had begun lessons. It was held at the apartment of the baritone player, Marcel Josse, and when I got out of the elevator I could already hear in the resonant hallway, the marvelous sounds of that famous quartet whose recordings I practically had worn out and memorized!

That day, after they had been playing for awhile they took a break and Mule passed around some publicity photos for everyone to sign, which would then presumably be sent out. When they had finished signing them, I was startled and delighted to receive two copies, one of the quartet and one of Mule himself, with warm inscriptions above the signatures.

Mule left his soprano at Josse's apartment in between rehearsals, and at the rehearsal I attended he tried out reeds as the quartet played and complained mildly about how hard it was to find a good one (Where have you heard that one before?), while I continued to marvel at how wonderful he sounded. It seemed to me, on hearing him in that professional playing situation that he had all the ardor and vitality of a young man combined with the sagacity and calmness of an elder, vastly experienced musician. Marcel Moyse, the great French flute virtuoso told me that he remembered hearing Mule play as a young man, when he first burst onto the Parisian musical scene, and he said that it was a revelation to everyone who heard him.

Mule played a lot in my lessons, often demonstrating his points, it seems to me more so than he did in the classes, though I have photos of him playing in class as well. What an experience, after working on a piece such as the Sonatine Sportive of Alexandre Tcherepnine, then to hear le maitre (the master), play it from a couple of feet away! How can I ever forget hearing him play the slow movement of that piece as well as so many other pieces?

He invited me to a concert that the quartet was playing in a neighboring town, Mantes-la-Jolie, where Selmer had their factory. I went and heard it - perhaps one of the last concerts the Quatuor played, since Mule retired from quartet playing shortly thereafter, as he had retired from solo playing several years previously.

He also invited me to a recording session the quartet was doing for the ORTF, as the French radio was then called. The composer of the piece they were recording was present and I took some pictures, as I also did occasionally at the class.

Mule had one really great reed, which he kept for special occasions and he showed it to me once. It was so old it was practically black. He told me where he had gotten it. I think it was in Rouen, where Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake, but in any case he mentioned parenthetically the connection with the Maid of Orléans. I said that perhaps it had come from the actual stake, which might have accounted for its blackened condition, and I always thought of it as his Joan of Arc reed.

I remember that I once complimented Mule on his pronunciation of my last name. He smiled and said that when he was studying English, one of the first sentences he had to learn was, "My tailor is rich (Mon tailleur est riche)," and that that was why he pronounced my name so well.

He also told me a joke in English about a man who asked a railway conductor how long the train would be in the next station, to which the conductor replied, "From two to two to two two." (i.e., from 1:58 to 2:02.): A man of gentle humor.

Mule's warm geniality and friendly smile were always an encouraging part of working with him and as I think of him now, they vividly recall his always heartening kindness and encouragement, just as his recordings and the memory of his playing recall his wonderful abilities as a master musician and teacher. Indeed, in those recordings and in all of our many treasured memories of him, la légende continue.

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