I have a (Naxos) CD of music played on a glass harmonica. Fascinating though it is (I'm always interested in obscure instruments) I find I can only listen to it for up to ten minutes. It has been said that it has driven some people mad playing it and I have heard something similar said about ringing church bells. Some people have described the sound of the glass harmonica as celestial. If heaven is full of glass harmonicas and church bells, I'm not sure I want to go there. 

Some instruments sustain interest in themselves and some instruments fade away. Saxophone did not find itself on the whole in classical music. It probably doesnot have enough colours and tembre to sustain interest.
On the other hand piano, violin, cello have enough depth to them to attract composers again and again.
It is a survival of the fittiest of musical instruments world. Some species manage to make a comeback.

Quite so, Autoharp. Anyone who thinks the saxophone is lacking in colour or interest has been listening to the wrong music, I think.

Bernard Herrmann's "Journey to the centre of the earth" features a serpent.
Most gross it sounds as well.

Blame the composer, not the instrument, perhaps.

The contrabass clarinet, yes - an instrument seeming beloved of both Colin and David Matthews, among others (and why on earth did Schönberg omit one from the group of seven, no less, that he used in Gurrelieder?) - but going on cues from from "autoharp" and Richard, let's hear it for the contabass saxophone in E flat - and also its much more recent companion (or rather alternative) the tubax. The problems with the former are twofold; firstly, very few of them appear to have been made and, secondly, their agility capability is less than that of the tubax in E flat, partly because of the sheer size of its keys and partly because of its enormous mouthpiece. The latter (which was, I think, invented less than ten years ago) has smaller keys and uses a standard baritone sax mouthpiece, which both make it easier to play, although its bore is rather smaller (and its appearance rather closer to a metal contrabassoon) so its tone is a little less rich than the contrabass sax's. It's a wonder that the bass sax is not used more often, too.

Del Mar, in his Amatomy of the Orchestra, makes out a strong case for the contrabass clarinet as the ideal orchestral bass woodwind instrument that never was; certainly, the present and long-standing incumbent, the contrabassoon, wonderful as it is, does not have quite the same combination of agility and power, a fact that I couldn't help but notice when listening a while ago to Michael Tilson Thomas's concerto for it (he doesn't actually call it a contrabassoon concerto and I've forgotten the actual title), even though played by a brilliant virtuoso who seemed to have no problem taking the instrument through the most improbably florid passagework and up to around middle C - its penetrating power is simply not all that great (and Tilson Thomas clearly used his conductorial experience to ensure that the orchestral writing was at all times appropriately discreet so as not to risk swamping it).

The sax family has for so long been too much associated with jazz, as though jazz was its only or principal raison d'être, although this is a good deal less the case now than it once was; personally, I'm quite interested in the notion of integrating various of its individual members in a wind ensemble and in fact did just that in a piece a while ago...

Best,

Alistair

No, Companion to the Orchestra was published in 1987, but Anatomy is very good too, from what I've heard.

Thanks for that, Tony. A brief search reveals that in this work "Latin dance music is embedded in and contrasts with a variously tonal and atonal language." Think I might give it a wide berth.