Cosmopolitan Inspirations

Charles Jean-Baptiste Soualle was born in Arras in 1824. He studied clarinet at the Paris Conservatoire in the class of Hyacinthe Klosé, graduating in 1844 with a first prize on clarinet, and subsequently worked abroad as a musician alongside French marine troops in Senegal.Footnote ⁸ Following his service, he performed in the orchestra of the Opéra Comique in 1848, before relocating to England. Here Soualle ‘had the honor of the first solo [saxophone] appearance in London’,Footnote ⁹ when he performed as part of a nineteenth-century musical institution, the famed promenade concerts led by Jullien.Footnote ¹⁰

Jullien was renowned as a master entertainer, possessing a fondness for light music and showmanship that he prioritized over his (incomplete) studies at the Paris Conservatoire. In London and regional centres, he led large ensembles – typically comprising one hundred musicians, but scaling up to even double this number – performing ‘populist admixtures’ of dances, songs and occasional extracts from orchestral repertoire,Footnote ¹¹ for audiences often between one- and five-thousand strong. As Katherine Preston describes, a heady combination of ‘the music, the orchestra’s virtuoso instrumentalists, Jullien’s conducting prowess, and a barrage of publicity worked collectively to create a mid-century musical furore that escaped the notice of no one’,Footnote ¹² filling the likes of London’s Covent Garden. Jullien’s energy and industry easily lent itself to caricature (his skills on multiple instruments such as flute and violin, as well as with the baton, are illustrated in Figure 1), but he was also an important node in the network of mid-nineteenth century saxophonists: he knew of the saxophone from his time in Paris, and was one of Sax’s associates. In 1856, the two developed a model military band based on new French regulations, and toured England under the French-Algerian title of the Zouaves, showcasing saxhorns and a complement of five saxophones.Footnote ¹³

Figure 1. Benjamin Roubaud, Louis-Antoine Jullien, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Est. Jullien LA 003, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8421378x.

In November 1850, at London’s Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, Soualle first performed on the ‘corno musa’ with Jullien’s ensemble. This neologism was a pseudonym for the saxophone, as well as a play on the bagpipe-like cornemuse from France; the new instrument featured in Jullien’s Great Exhibition Quadrille, a work celebrating the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Held from May to October 1851 in Hyde Park’s Crystal Palace, the Great Exhibition attracted an estimated six million visitors – nearly a third of the population of Britain at the time. As the first of many world’s fairs and universal exhibitions shaping the industrial, commercial, and cultural aspects of nineteenth-century life, some 13,000 exhibits were on show from all corners of Britain, its colonies and dependencies, Europe, and the Americas; a commercial legacy of this event was the establishment of department stores, whose sections emulated the separate pavilions in the Great Exhibition.Footnote ¹⁴

Expressive of growing musical globalism, Jullien’s Great Exhibition Quadrille reflected the diversity of its namesake event by combining dances and melodies from Spain, Italy, Syria and India among others, and won the affection of audiences enough to be considered a success.Footnote ¹⁵ The saxophone featured only briefly, alongside the harp in a delicate feature titled the Aurora Serenade;Footnote ¹⁶ the Aurora Serenade appears in the introduction to the third movement of the band score, and is not present in surviving piano reductions or short scores.Footnote ¹⁷ Covers of piano reductions of this composition showcase the exotic dress of the varied cultures represented at the Exhibition (see Figure 2). Following a reprise of the work in 1852, also performed by Soualle, reviews echoed something of Berlioz’s earlier descriptions of the instrument’s pathos:

Figure 2. John Brandard, cover image for Louis-Antoine Jullien’s Great Exhibition Quadrille, (London: Jullien & Co., 1851), Elton Collection, Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, Shropshire UK.

Beyond the Great Exhibition Quadrille, Stephen Cottrell notes that Soualle could draw from a wellspring of cosmopolitan influences.Footnote ¹⁹ In 1851, Soualle helped to render the Indian Quadrille as a member of Jullien’s orchestra; however, this was more an imagination of India than any true rendition. A London critic commented that its ‘familiar Scotch melodies and Tylorean [sic] airs’ sounded ‘more promenadish than Indianic perhaps, but nonetheless piquant and quaint’.Footnote ²⁰ That same year, Soualle returned to Paris and performed on saxophone in Félicien David’s oratorio Le désert, a work composed after David’s visits to Egypt and the Middle East.Footnote ²¹ Soualle had indeed been enculturated into these cultural tropes, for as Edward W. Said observed, ‘in the first half of the nineteenth century, Paris was the capital of the Orientalist world’.Footnote ²²

Suffused by these ideas and examples, Soualle remade his performing identity into an exotic new guise. He titled himself ‘Ali Ben Sou Alle’, styling himself as a Turk with a turbaned and robed appearance – in José-Modesto Diago Ortega’s estimation, applying some of the publicity techniques of Jullien,Footnote ²³ and undeterred by an apparent lack of lived experience in Ottoman territory (see Figure 3).Footnote ²⁴ In 1852 he commenced an extensive solo tour, ‘prodigious by the standards of the time’,Footnote ²⁵ in which he performed in Scotland, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the Philippines, China and India – a remarkable individual feat of musical globalism in itself. Ralph Whiteoak comments that Soualle ‘electrified colonial audiences’ wherever he performed,Footnote ²⁶ and Australia was to be no exception.

Figure 3. José-Modesto Diago Ortega, Map of Sou Alle’s Travels Around the World, 2019. From Diago Ortega, ‘Ali-Ben-Sou-Alle’s Turcophone Patent (1860)’, 176. Reproduced with permission.

Antipodean Lustre

Goldrush-era Melbourne, having been only recently settled by the British in 1835, was a nascent setting for theatre and concertgoing. Concerts as a fixture of public life were in an emerging state across the Australian colonies: Sydney, settled as a penal colony from 1788, saw its first public concert performances staged by merchant and theatre director Barnett Levey in 1826,Footnote ²⁷ after which these activities became ‘tenuously but also tenaciously established’ during the 1830s and 1840s.Footnote ²⁸ The Pavilion, Melbourne’s first theatre, opened in 1841 as a rudimentary structure known to sway in the wind, with audiences possessing little of the sophistication that might have been hoped for by its proprietors or the authorities. Here, traditional values of popular recreation inherited from England, such as disorder, exaggerated behaviour, and challenges to morality, coloured cultural life.Footnote ²⁹ Riots were not uncommon, leading to the stationing of police among audiences to keep order, and audience conduct, combined with the conspicuous presence of so many sex workers, meant that by the mid-1840s the Melbourne theatre was ‘regarded as so disreputable that “respectable” women no longer attended’.Footnote ³⁰

An egalitarian streak pervaded this new society. Unlike more stratified European social orders, in Australia the officer class, gentry, and ‘lower orders’ participated together in a range of recreational activities, a dynamic largely driven by demographics, given free settlers only attained majority status across the continent in the 1830s. Audience diversity, however, did not preclude critical disapproval, and reviews espoused high-minded endorsements of the civilizing role of art, alongside a corresponding disapproval of acts earning popular acclaim but encouraging antisocial or subversive behaviour. Following the fourth of Barnett Levey’s concerts in August 1826, which featured comic songs performed ‘with the most irresistible drollery’,Footnote ³¹ the Sydney Monitor commented:

For the city of Melbourne and colony of Victoria, the discovery of gold in 1851 transformed a remote British dependency into a land of wealth and opportunity, with a rapidly rising population possessing growing disposable income for leisure. In the realm of entertainment, concerts held a more limited capacity for undesirable messaging – actors were known to ad-lib ‘indelicate compositions’ to win the favour their audiences, either on a whim or to cover if they had forgotten their lines – helping them enjoy a more upstanding image than plays or pantomimes.Footnote ³³ Operas were even occasionally staged, including by overseas touring companies, albeit with adapted casting and orchestration, and a weighting towards audience entertainment over strict musical fidelity. In an era of shared public culture, even touring minstrel shows succeeded in attracting the elite: an 1850 Melbourne performance of the Blythe Waterland Serenaders, the first professional minstrel company to perform in Australia, was patronised by the city’s superintendent, mayor, and resident judge.Footnote ³⁴ Regardless of the genre, however, stakes were high for performers who were known to contend with ‘hissing, heckling, and thrown fruit’ should they displease their audiences.Footnote ³⁵

Soualle sailed into Port Philip Bay on Christmas Eve 1852, disembarking in Geelong among a party of French mechanics.Footnote ³⁶ Further records of his early months in the colony are scarce: one wonders whether he attended Melbourne’s first promenade concerts, modelled on Jullien’s and run by Jullien’s former bassoonist John Winterbottom, which began in January 1853 at the Olympic Circus at the eastern end of Bourke Street.Footnote ³⁷ He was unlikely to have restricted his travels to Geelong and Melbourne: in an 1861 interview, he confirmed that one of his motives for travelling to Australia was to seek his fortune prospecting for gold.Footnote ³⁸ Surviving accounts of musical life on the goldfields from this period are limited, and Ballarat’s first regular newspaper, the Ballarat Times, only commenced publication in March 1854.Footnote ³⁹ In any case, by June 1853 Soualle was billed to perform in one of Melbourne’s first public buildings, the Mechanics’ Institute on Collins Street (see Figure 4; today, this renovated venue is known as the Melbourne Athenaeum).

Figure 4. Samuel Thomas Gill, Mechanics Institution Melbourne (Melbourne: J.J. Blundell & Co., 1855), National Library of Australia, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-133103377.

The Mechanics’ Institute advertised a ‘grand concert’, appealing to the kind of audience for whom John Whiteoak notes ‘“Novelty! Novelty!! Novelty!!!” was the catch-cry’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Publicized alongside Soualle was a cast of ‘eminent artistes’ including the full military band of the British 40th Regiment then stationed in Melbourne, led by bandmaster Henry Johnson; two vocalists; a violinist; a cornetist; and a pianist. The notion of a ‘foreign gentleman … with very considerable skill’, and his unknown instrument suitable for both soloistic and orchestral musical settings, drew enthusiastic coverage in the Argus newspaper:

On this ‘most remarkable’ instrument, Soualle was to close the first act with two items, performing variations on the popular song In My Cottage, before sharing the stage with a vocalist for the ballad Come Back! Come Back!.Footnote ⁴² Two days later, the same outlet updated its readership on what to expect of the performance, at least concerning matters of presentation (for a later representation of Soualle in the Australian press, see Figure 10 below):

Soualle’s act’s combination of ‘picturesque costume’ and popular songs recalls something of Jullien’s Indian Quadrille two years prior, affirming Derek Scott’s observation that orientalist musical styles required ‘only a knowledge of orientalist signifiers’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nevertheless, in the afterglow of the concert, local enthusiasm that had anticipated his debut was sustained. A report in the Argus the following day captured patrons’ fascination with his masculine appearance, elaborate dress, poise on stage, and unique cast of instruments. Moreover, as if to emphasize his act’s exotic appeal, Soualle’s heretofore mentioned saxophone is now dubbed a ‘turkophone’:Footnote ⁴⁵

A second concert – for patrons paying above earlier admission feesFootnote ⁴⁷ – followed a month later, and leaned further into the Turkish theme. The Mechanics’ Institute was extensively decorated: the Argus detailed ‘a row of thirteen elegant variegated lamps, each bearing a letter of the singular name’ (‘Ali Ben Sou Alle’) hung over the doorway; inside, one end of the hall was ‘covered with variegated drapery, supposed to represent a Turkish pavilion; the musicians’ seats and music stands being also richly hung, while the profusion of lights was dazzling to behold’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Soualle’s instruments were also diverse, as in addition to the turkophone and clarinet, the ‘turkophonini’ or soprano saxophone is also mentioned in later Australian reviews,Footnote ⁴⁹ to say nothing of the bagpipe-like ‘squeaking pipes’ of his debut.Footnote ⁵⁰

Musically, Soualle’s novel timbres conveyed a more familiar repertoire including fantasias on opera themes, minstrel show tunes, popular ballads, and, perhaps spurred by Jullien’s concerts, colourfully embellished national anthems. Soualle’s variations on these melodies were central to his act: in an era when all music was performed and heard live, and in an Australia where the ‘tyranny of distance’ influenced the kinds of works that could be sourced to perform locally, musical items were known to be repeated until they were very familiar.Footnote ⁵¹ Here, Soualle’s florid musicality thrived, with goldrush-era Melbourne proving a welcome complement to his saxophone’s silver hue. Later in winter 1853 Soualle returned to Geelong, where a critic writing in the Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer offered representative praise:

This esteem is commensurate to that which reviewers extended to other international musicians concurrently touring Australia,Footnote ⁵³ such as Austrian violinist Miska Hauser.Footnote ⁵⁴ Moreover, references to an ‘illustrious Turk’, and ‘soul-stirring’ performances earning the title of Pacha, an Ottoman equivalent of a peerage, speak to a warmth perhaps unusual for a non-European act of the time. In his survey of the Australian popular stage to 1914, Richard Waterhouse writes of this time as when racial tropes of the minstrel show held mass appeal, and the British applied racial slurs to ‘any non-white’ to degrade any ethnic group of their choosing, including indigenous Australians.Footnote ⁵⁵ In such light, the affection afforded to Soualle’s brand of ‘otherness’ is striking – even if the Geelong reviewer’s choice of language, in speaking to ‘dangerous powers over our susceptibilities’, suggests a degree of frisson.

Crimean Echoes

Supplementing novel instruments, exotic dress, familiar repertoire, and prodigious musicality, geopolitical events were a fifth element working to win Soualle the favour of Australian audiences. In October 1853 the Crimean War erupted, which aligned the British, French, and Ottoman empires against the growing perceived threat of Tsarist Russia. Resonances from the conflict reached the concert stage to favourably inflect the saxophone’s Australian reception.

For newly wealthy Australian colonies far from their imperial capital, fears of a Russian invasion grew over the nineteenth century. To the north-east, the Russian Empire had controlled Alaska since 1799, and, in the words of historian Clem Lack, ‘considered the Pacific a Russian lake’ (see Figure 5 illustrating Australia’s relative proximity and exposure).Footnote ⁵⁶ Earlier Russian voyages to the antipodes had caused alarm: the warship Suvorov visited Sydney’s Port Jackson in 1814, the cruiser Amerika docked in Sydney in 1832 and 1835, and expeditions as far south as Antarctica were undertaken.Footnote ⁵⁷ For their part, Australian colonies were hardly well defended: in 1839, an unheralded squadron of US naval vessels dropped anchor in Sydney Harbour, and were not detected until the following morning.Footnote ⁵⁸

Figure 5. Joseph Meyer, ‘Map of the Pacific Ocean: Currents, Temperature, Trade Routes, and Voyages of Discovery’, National Library of Australia, http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-232358696.

Consequently, for many Australians the Crimean conflict was of almost existential interest. News of Britain’s declaration of war was published in Melbourne on 2 January 1854,Footnote ⁵⁹ adding concern to earlier reports of a Russian fleet prowling Pacific waters.Footnote ⁶⁰ Sir Robert Nickle, commander of military forces in Australia, was tasked with reorganizing the colonies’ defence, which led to the stationing of new ships and construction or fortification of coastal batteries to defend Sydney and Melbourne.Footnote ⁶¹ A campaign to raise money for a patriotic fund attracted some £65,000 in donations – a considerable sum that a colonial government might otherwise spend on a major road, or what a new hospital in England might cost.Footnote ⁶² Local volunteer militia such as the Royal Melbourne Regiment were also formed, to help calm fears of Russian raids.Footnote ⁶³

For Soualle, this alarm accelerated his good fortune. On 13 March 1854 Melbourne’s Mechanics’ Institute hosted a reunion of the 40th Regiment and ‘Ali Ben Sou Alle’, as part of a second ‘grand concert’ whose programme included a new piece by Soualle titled the Turko-Russian Historical Polka. This was ‘composed on the arrival of the news of the late victories of the Turks at Kalafat and Oltenitza’, the first engagements of the conflict.Footnote ⁶⁴ Afterwards, an Argus critic noted: ‘the orchestra composed of the band of the 40th, was, as might have been expected, au fait of the peculiar pieces in which M. Soualle delights, and the Turco-Russian Polka and the Storm piece were therefore effectively produced’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Indeed, astute programming underscored much of the favour Soualle garnered with Australian audiences. He regularly performed well-received selections of British airs, embellished renditions of La Marseillaise,Footnote ⁶⁶ and newly composed musical tributes to his audiences, such as the Australian Waltz performed in Melbourne in May 1854,Footnote ⁶⁷ and Queen of the South, dedicated to Lady Hotham, wife of the Governor of Victoria, which was premiered in Geelong that August.Footnote ⁶⁸ Following his Victorian introduction, Soualle toured the colonies of Van Diemen’s Land (known as Tasmania from 1856) and New South Wales, where he performed in capital cities as well as regional centres, and his reception grew even more fond. The New South Welsh town of Goulburn expressed particular amity, with an 1855 review admiring both his instrument and musicianship:

One piece composed around this appearance survives. Soualle’s Goulburn Waltz: à mes amis de Goulburn was dedicated to the people of Goulburn in February 1855, and mailed to them following a successful performance there two weeks earlier;Footnote ⁷⁰ this stay was also marked by a breakfast in Soualle’s honour attended by Miska Hauser.Footnote ⁷¹ The Goulburn Waltz itself is a fairly conventional waltz, with only occasional (and diatonic) grace notes in the melody hinting at European ‘Turkish style’ musical signifiers from the preceding century,Footnote ⁷² suggesting that Soualle’s virtuosity and manner of presentation did much of the work to charm his audiences.Footnote ⁷³ Having been published and advertised for sale in Goulburn later that year,Footnote ⁷⁴ a copy of the Goulburn Waltz is held by the National Library of Australia (see Example 1 for its closing stanza).

Example 1. Ali Ben Sou Alle, Goulburn Waltz: a mes amis de Goulburn (n.p., 1855), 4, bars 149–183. National Library of Australia, http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-181800081.

Soualle concluded his antipodean engagements in July 1855, with performances advertised in Brisbane,Footnote ⁷⁵ preceded by a brief stint in New Zealand and concerts in Wollongong and nearby Kiama (see Figure 6 for a map of Soualle’s currently confirmed Australian performance locations).Footnote ⁷⁶ Australian colonies, which had been ‘vicariously at war’ in Crimea,Footnote ⁷⁷ had not only warmly welcomed this turban-clad virtuoso, but would go on to designate streets and entire towns after locations and figures from the conflict: main roads named Inkerman, Alma, Cardigan, and Napier in broader Melbourne, and the Victorian towns of Balaclava and Sebastopol, indicate this strength of feeling.Footnote ⁷⁸ Given the redolence of the saxophone’s introduction to local audiences, one is given to wonder whether in central Melbourne a Turkophone Lane (or, perhaps, a Sou Alle Alley?)Footnote ⁷⁹ was ever mooted.

Figure 6. Soualle’s confirmed appearances around Australia, from his arrival in Geelong in December 1852, to a performance in Kiama in June 1855. Concerts in Maitland (Newcastle) in January and February 1855, and Moreton Bay (Brisbane) in July 1855, were also advertised. Locations sourced from Skinner, ‘Ali-Ben Sou Alle in Australia’, Australharmony, and mapped by the author.

Subsequently, Soualle’s travels continued apace. Sailing north on a tour around southeast Asia, he introduced the saxophone to audiences in Manila, Singapore, Batavia (Jakarta), Shanghai, and Hong Kong. During a subsequent stay in Rajdah, India, he reportedly converted to Islam and so bewitched the locals that he was named the area’s musical director.Footnote ⁸⁰ He then returned to France, where his Caprice for alto saxophone and piano was independently published in 1861,Footnote ⁸¹ and his fame drew invitations to perform for the French imperial family. An audience with the Prince of Wales followed, where he presented a compendium of his pieces, the Royal Album pour saxophones par Ali Ben Sou Alle of 1865, now held by the British Library,Footnote ⁸² and contained within the Royal Album is Soualle’s Souvenirs d’Australie et de Manille. A kind of populist admixture of its own, this piece combines: an opening aria at moderato; a rendition with variations of Pennsylvania-born Stephen Foster’s song Old Folks at Home, popular in Australia at the time; and a bolero in tribute to the Spanish-ruled Philippines. The choice of Foster’s song reflects something of what Percy Grainger would later describe as the ‘patiently yearning, inactive sentimental wistfulness that we find so touchingly expressed in much American art’, which found favour among nineteenth-century Australian audiences.Footnote ⁸³ In Soualle’s hands, Foster’s famed melody is introduced and then decorated in increasingly lively variations; following the bolero, a rousing coda marked più animato brings the piece to a triumphant close.Footnote ⁸⁴

Contrary to his Australian reception, however, on his European return Soualle’s 1860s performances drew mixed reviews. Fading praise was especially marked among London critics attuned to prevailing cultural winds, and following another performance of In My Cottage at the Royal Opera House’s popular concerts in 1864 (around which time he was first photographed in costume, and with a rare straight alto saxophone; see Figure 7), a Musical Times critic commented:

Figure 7. Adolphe Naudin, Ali Ben Sou Alle, 1864. UK National Archives, reproduced in Cottrell, ‘Charles Jean-Baptiste Soualle and the Saxophone’, 195.

Set against the broader story of the saxophone’s challenging nineteenth-century introduction, the fascination evoked by Soualle’s performances proved more an exception than rule. Legacies were not entirely absent: in Australia, Henry Johnson, who led the band of the 40th Regiment in Soualle’s 1853 Melbourne debut, is documented as performing on saxophone for Victorian audiences between 1860 and 1868. At a series of promenade concerts at Covent Garden in 1865, saxophone solos were performed by players going by pseudonyms of ‘Ali Ben Mustapha’, and, somewhat less plausibly, ‘Ali Ben Jenkins’.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, just as in the concert halls of Paris, novelty did not translate into sustained or widespread incorporation in England, or even recognition. Two decades hence, George Bernard Shaw observed: ‘There are whole families of genuine additions to the resources of the orchestra that have not yet got further than a place in a few of our military bands. Probably not one student in the Royal Academy or Royal College of Music could “spot” a saxophone blindfold’.Footnote ⁸⁷ For his part, Soualle later returned to Paris and, powers of advertising evidently intact, promoted elixirs drawing on his knowledge of plants and herbs gleaned from his voyages (see Figure 8). He died in Paris in 1899.Footnote ⁸⁸

Figure 8. Advertisement for Soualle’s ‘New Treatment for Neuralgia, Gout, Rheumatism’, Le Figaro, 17 January 1877, quoted in Diago Ortego, ‘Ali-Ben-Sou-Alle’s Turcophone Patent (1860)’: 176.

‘More than Ordinary Curiosity’ and a Russian Scare

Any scholarly appraisal of Soualle’s Australian performances must reflexively engage with ideas of representation, power, and invention that were addressed so influentially in Said’s 1978 text.Footnote ⁸⁹ Orientalism, Said argued, could best be understood as a ‘[Western] knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison, or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or governing’,Footnote ⁹⁰ with sociologically derived latent (passive, positivistic) and manifest (explicit and more judgement-laden) aspects.Footnote ⁹¹ If Soualle’s musical ties to the Orient proved elusive, his choices of name, costume, and mise-en-scène reflected mercantile self-promotion – in Adam Geczy’s reckoning, ‘one of the nineteenth-century artist’s most important tools in the Romantic box of vainglorious tricks’.Footnote ⁹² Buoyed by events in Crimea, what Said might call ‘worldly circumstance’,Footnote ⁹³ Soualle’s sense of enterprise corresponded with a wave of Turkish taste across the British Empire, made real in London through the establishment of an Oriental & Turkish Museum in Hyde Park in November 1854, whose advertisement’s figure shares a kind of resemblance with the ‘Ali Ben Sou Alle’ depicted in the Australian press (see Figs. 9 and 10).

Figure 9. Catalogue of the Oriental & Turkish Museum, St. George’s Gallery, Hyde Park Corner, Piccadilly (London: W.J. Golbourn, 1854), Look and Learn, Peter Jackson Collection.

Figure 10. ‘Ali Ben Sou Alle’ as represented in the Illustrated Sydney News (Sydney), 23 December 1854, 460; in Skinner, ‘Ali-Ben Sou Alle in Australia’, Australharmony.

Yet Said observed that sympathetic European representations of the Orient do not, by themselves, defy his broader thesis. From the eighteenth century, a European sensibility had been invited to ‘see hidden elements of kinship between himself and the Orient … [Mozart’s] The Magic Flute (in which Masonic codes intermingle with visions of a benign Orient) and The Abduction from the Seraglio locate a particularly magnanimous form of humanity in the Orient’,Footnote ⁹⁴ which nevertheless belong to a broader sweep of Western-led othering and marginalization.Footnote ⁹⁵ To Australian audiences in a burgeoning concert-going society, for whom Soualle ‘rendered Mozart’s music as [they] have never before heard [it]’,Footnote ⁹⁶ the extent of these connections may ultimately remain speculative. Other more exoticized language from Soualle’s Australian reviews, such as Meyerbeer’s music’s ‘dusky magnificence’,Footnote ⁹⁷ or ‘soul-stirring’ sounds ‘possessing dangerous powers over our susceptibilities’,Footnote ⁹⁸ blur lines of timbre and repertory to speak to what Matthew Head describes as an ‘ambiguity over where orientalist/exoticist reference begins and ends [which] is foundational to Romanticism’.Footnote ⁹⁹

In important ways, Soualle’s act complexifies a Saidian view of orientalist cultural representations. Rather than casting the Orient as being ‘a place isolated from the mainstream of European progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce’,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ the novelty of the ‘turkophone’, as a piece of musical technology,Footnote ¹⁰¹ worked to defy the trope of Oriental timelessness and backwardness, or an otherwise ‘indolent Ottoman East’.Footnote ¹⁰² Nor, through Soualle’s masculine stylings, did his act embody a ‘feminine penetrability’ requiring Western intervention and salvation, even if a slowly ailing Ottoman Empire was increasingly advanced upon by European powers over the course of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰³ Instead, in a martially charged antipodean atmosphere, ‘Ali Ben Sou Alle’ manifested a spirit of inquiry in his audiences to add a degree of perceived connection to local intrigue about developments in Crimea. In an 1855 Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal review, following a concert in which the hall was ‘crowded to excess’, a correspondent reflected:

This review concludes by lauding how ‘our Bathurst atmosphere never before lent its aid in the manufacture of melody at once so sweet, polished, and powerful’, before criticizing the French vocalist performing after Soualle for his broken English,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ to hint at some of the specific conditions Australian audiences placed on (even allied) outsiders. To the extent that Soualle’s persona was entirely convincing to Australian eyes and ears, however, other reports noted scepticism. Contrary to any suspension of disbelief expressed after his Melbourne debut, a later Bathurst review enounced a wiseness to the act’s provenance:

To be sure, Soualle’s tour coincided with growing projections of Western military and political power, in a ‘golden age of Orientalism’ bookended by Napoleon’s Egyptian military campaign and the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Said articulated that Orientalism is ‘fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s differences with its weakness’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In Australia’s hemisphere, British campaigns in China during the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60 stand as proof, a hostility echoed in the widespread discrimination faced by Chinese miners on Australian goldfields, and, by extension, their musical endeavours.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Elsewhere, European colonial administrations in the lands of Soualle’s south-east Asian performance itinerary also illustrate this dynamic. From a European standpoint, martial themes and orientalist cultural expressions share a long history: Jonathan Bellman credits the 1683 repulse of Ottoman armies from the gates of Vienna as giving rise to the ‘Turkish style’ of European music, which supposedly ‘evolved from a sort of battle music played by Turkish military bands’ during that siege, [which] was so little heard or remembered that the music itself ‘was thus almost entirely the product of the European imagination’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Soualle’s Australian context both reflected and refracted ideas from the European imagination. In distant, diasporic British outposts beginning to be seen as a new nation in their own right,Footnote ¹¹¹ the local reception of this self-styled ‘Ottoman’ virtuoso pushes against Said’s 1978 frame, which posited that ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self’.Footnote ¹¹² At a time when great power politics allied the British, French, and Ottoman empires, this episode evoked more amity than prejudice in Australian audiences, who, functioning as Roger Covell described as ‘a transplanted and more or less subsidiary culture’ to that in Europe,Footnote ¹¹³ wielded the least power in a global political equation. Indeed, the role distance played in the refraction of ideas of political and cultural value was later supported by Said, in a series of essays published in 1994: ‘The one relationship that does not change is the hierarchical one between the metropole and overseas generally’, between (in this instance) Britain, and ‘those peoples who geographically and morally inhabit the realm beyond Europe (Africa, Asia, plus Ireland and Australia in the British case)’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Even more pointedly, Said contended that from a British vantage point, white colonist Australians were perceived, alongside US Americans and the Irish, as ‘an inferior race well into the twentieth century’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Perhaps most remarkably, at this particular historical moment, Soualle’s powers of invention coalesced with Saidian ‘worldly circumstance’ to inspire a particularly vivid expression of the Australian imagination. In 1854, at the height of the Crimean War, local reports appeared claiming that ‘the price of rifles has superseded the price of gold’,Footnote ¹¹⁶ in response to rumours that a ‘Russian fleet is now in the Pacific Ocean, with no pacific intention towards the Felician Land’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ A 29 June article in the Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer outlined how Geelong locals might arm and conduct themselves to resist a Russian incursion, in twelve clear steps, and perhaps not entirely in jest. The tenth item reads:

While this particular event did not transpire, the threat was evidently felt. A notable Russian scare took place ten weeks later, when celebratory gun salutes from ships in Port Philip Bay were misinterpreted as signs of an impending raid, and a flurry of cannon fire and fireworks sparked alarm in Melbourne,Footnote ¹¹⁹ with Soualle likely across the bay in Geelong at the time.Footnote ¹²⁰ In any case, that a saxophone would be proposed to help lead the putative defence of Australia, in the hands of a turbaned musician, is one of the more unlikely possibilities Adolphe Sax might have envisioned during its challenging genesis a decade earlier.

Subsequently, such strong ties between the saxophone and ideas of freedom would not resonate in Australia again until 1918,Footnote ¹²¹ at the advent of the Australian Jazz Age, when in the throes of the Great War Australians once again looked to cultural exemplars from overseas allies.Footnote ¹²² Although some six decades separate these episodes, historical records and musicological scholarship suggest an alignment between the meanings encoded in Soualle’s saxophone, and those conveyed by the saxophone that helped to open the freewheeling vaudevillian performances of Fuller’s Jazz Band in 1918 – in John Whiteoak’s summation, more an ‘imaginative burlesque of [a] new [US] American craze’ than any kind of authentic reproduction.Footnote ¹²³ Whiteoak notes that Soualle performed ‘presumably improvised fantasias’, and can be considered ‘almost a mid-nineteenth-century counterpart of visiting star American jazz saxophonists’, who visited Australia in the Australian Jazz Age’s second stanza from 1923.Footnote ¹²⁴ ‘Ali Ben Sou Alle’ could scarcely be called a burlesque act, but these performances’ creative forays in both compositional and performance domains spoke to cultural diplomacy in a manner concordant with later saxophonic endeavours.

Set to the charged atmosphere of goldrush-era Australia, Soualle’s act proved a deft match for local musical tastes, cultural appetites, and geopolitical fears and favours. In a manner both validating and challenging subsequent scholarly frames, on 1850s Australian stages this ‘illustrious Turk’ demonstrated a worldly interplay of culture, commerce, and camaraderie, with novel instruments possessing a symbolic malleability of their own to shed new light on musical globalism and nineteenth-century music’s broader cultural reach. Moreover, as today’s lingering spectre of Russian irredentism reminds us, some themes underlying the Australian reception of ‘Ali Ben Sou Alle’ are not wholly consigned to the past. Perhaps, then, this remarkable episode is deserving of a greater space in contemporary consciousness to reflect the attention, wonder, and delight it originally held.