Composer Fernande Decruck was a prolific creator of works for saxophone and other instruments. Her distinctive style drew on both classical forms and Impressionism. Decruck was born Fernande Breilh on Christmas Day of 1896 in Gaillac, in southern France, and she is sometimes known as Fernande Breilh-Decruck. She showed talent as both a keyboard player and a composer from an early age and was enrolled in classes at the Conservatoire de Paris, where she won prizes in harmony, fugue, counterpoint, and piano accompaniment. Decruck returned to the conservatory as an assistant professor, where one of her students was Olivier Messiaen; he later dedicated a composition to her. In 1926, Marcel Dupré joined her on the faculty and gave her lessons in organ improvisation. She married Maurice Decruck, a clarinetist, saxophonist, and double bassist, and accompanied him to New York, where he had landed a position as a double bassist with the New York Philharmonic. The couple had three children, Jeannine, Michel, and Alain. Decruck began writing saxophone works for her husband to perform, and in 1933, Maurice returned to France and established a publishing company, Les Editions de Paris, to market these. Fernande remained in the U.S. for a time, composing a large variety of works there, including works piano, organ, orchestra, and a cello concerto, as well as for saxophone and other wind instruments. When Decruck returned to France, she moved to Toulouse with her children and lived apart from her husband; they eventually divorced, and she continued to compose although she fell into difficult financial straits. Her best-known work is the Sonata in C sharp minor for saxophone and piano of 1943, for which Decruck also made an orchestral version. In later years, she taught at the Fontainebleau Conservatory. Decruck died in Fontainebleau on August 6, 1954. Her saxophone works are known to players of the instrument, which has a sparse classical repertory, and interest in works by women composers has stimulated some rediscovery of her wide and rarely derivative output. By the early 2020s, a half dozen of Decruck's works had been recorded, including a Harp Concerto (1944) and a Poème Héroïque for trumpet, horn, and orchestra (1946). ~ James Manheim, Rovi