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Powell's Q&AJasper ReesDescribe your latest project.
The book is called A Devil to Play. It chronicles a year of adventure I had when taking up the musical instrument I abandoned when I left school 22 distant years previously, culminating in the performance of a Mozart concerto to a paying audience. Why did I put myself through this? A lot of people, when they get to a certain age, start to pine for the glories of youth. Rather than buy myself a Harley, I decided to have my midlife crisis on the French horn. In a way, it's just as dangerous as a motorbike, hence the subtitle: One Man's Year-Long Struggle with the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument. Along the way, I fell in love with the instrument far more deeply than I ever did as a schoolboy, so alongside my own odyssey, I decided to tell the story of the horn. In a weird way, it's kind of a history of the world — from the moment horns blew down the walls of Jericho to the moment the Beatles blew down the walls of the old world. With a bit of classical music history thrown in. So the book is a personal memoir, a love letter to a beautiful instrument, and a diary of a high-risk quest. It's meant to be funny, too.
In a way, I kind of already have (see above). But I always used to fantasise about writing an autobiography entitled "I See Your Name." Being a freelance journalist in the UK, I'm frequently in the newspapers and no doubt often read, but friends in the business tend to read the byline rather than the article. Hence the suggested title. "I see your name," they say. Not bitter about this. I'm sure I say the same to others. But it's partly why I wanted to write my book: to do something to make myself memorable.
Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
Who's wilder on tour, rock bands or authors?
Who are your favorite characters in history? Have any of them influenced your writing?
Dogs, cats, budgies, or turtles?
Make a question of your own, then answer it.
A: The book is called I Found My Horn in the UK. In the U.S. it's A Devil to Play. Both titles come from the line of a lyric by the British pre-pop cabaret duo Flanders and Swann, which they performed to the tune of a famous Mozart horn concerto:
"To sound my horn, I had to develop my embouchure. Once my U.S. publishers had stated that they wouldn't have any truck with a double entendre in the title, it was kind of the obvious choice. If anyone confuses it for a crime novel, so be it. Recommend five or more books on a single subject of personal interest or expertise. My horn researches took me into all sorts of unexpected places. I tried in the lightest manner possible to tell the history of the instrument, which meant reading far more widely than anticipated. Naturally, I kicked off in the obvious place. Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life edited by Robert Spaethling: A fantastic new selection of the letters, with a very lively translation. It gave me some insight into Mozart's love for the rough and ready horn, and in particular for the horn player he wrote for, Josef Leutgeb, a fellow renegade from the Salzburg court and an old family friend. By the time Mozart wrote his first concerto for him, Leutgeb was hugely in debt to Mozart's father and running a small cheese shop. Haydn by H. C. Robbins Landon: This great work of scholarship gave me all the information I would never have found elsewhere about the miraculous horn players Haydn wrote for at Esterháza. Their stories were often very poignant. The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich by Michael H. Kater: Fascinating book about the business of music-making under the Nazis. The Song of Roland: This is the horn's first starring role. Charlemagne's troops are crossing the Pyrenees from Spain into France when their rearguard is attacked by the heathen hordes. Roland summons reinforcements, only after he knows his men are defeated, by sounding on his olifant, which makes his temples bleed (I know the feeling). French medieval romanticism: gory and glorious. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald: Question: Which Beatles song had the first ever solo by an orchestral instrument? Answer: "For No One." Paul McCartney loves the French horn. This fantastic work of Beatles scholarship told me which horn players recorded for the Beatles. I was able to go off and interview them about playing on Sgt. Pepper's, etc. The pay, it seems, was terrible, and they're mostly disdainful of the music, too.
÷ ÷ ÷ A journalist with two decades of experience, Jasper Rees writes for the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, and the Sunday Times. He lives in London.
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