Understanding the repertoire, history, and performance traditions of the saxophone quartet is essential to the modern saxophone quartet. The saxophone's lack of a strong orchestral tradition, its role in popular music, its role in jazz, its pedagogy, and choices in equipment are all contributing factors to inconsistency in saxophone quartet performance practices. Rather than present a performance guide to any particular piece or pieces, this dissertation endeavors to create a context for saxophone quartet performance. A context based on the early saxophone quartet repertoire and its performance history. A context that can inform not only the performance of the early works for saxophone quartet, but inform saxophone quartet performance in general. That context was created in several steps.

The early works for saxophone quartet and saxophone ensemble, 1844-1928, have been identified and examined. The composers of those works have been examined both individually and collectively. An analysis of the repertoire has been conducted using the lyric-form archetype and comparison with examples from 19^th century operatic repertoire. The early saxophone quartet performers have been identified and examined, and the early performance history of the saxophone quartet has been documented. In combination the historical, aesthetic, and analytical elements of the dissertation combine to identify and establish a performance context for the saxophone quartet.

Friedrich Lippmann first introduced his lyric-form archetype in the late 1960's in a series of studies of the music of Vincenzo Bellini, and his contemporaries. His lyric-form archetype set the course, over the next three decades, for scholarship of melody and phrase structure in primo ottocento opera, a term loosely used to cover the first half of the 19^th Century in Italian music. The analysis in this dissertation uses Lippmann's lyric-form archetype as well as the work of subsequent scholars to examine the conventions of melody, melodic-phrase structure, and form in the early works for saxophone quartet. These pieces for saxophone quartet are a purely instrumental application of the melodic style of the primo ottocento. The analysis identifies the relationship and link between the early works for saxophone quartet and the primo ottocento repertoire.