Recommended for horn players and lesser mortals
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Excellent. This book really captures the strange mix of joy, exhileration and sheer terror that being a horn player entails.
I'll be recommending it to all my horn playing friends, and to players of the easier instruments!
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Incredible!
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A most entertaining, well written and well researched book. What simply staggered me, however, is that I seem to be living in a parallel universe to Mr Rees. I've never identified so much with a book and this is why:
I, too, have just taken up the horn again after an 18 year break
I am just a year younger, at 38
I also have two young daughters
My mother's maiden name was Rees
I have begun again by playing exactly the same piece - Mozart's 3rd
I am experiencing all the same excitement/frustrations
I am an Arsenal fan
I used to play snooker
I get hayfever
I am exactly the same height - 5' 11.75
My parents used to have a hunting horn at home
I'm guessing that most readers won't be able to identify in quite the same way as me, therefore, but even to non-horn players, this is a compelling, fun and intelligent read!
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Stunningly Wonderful Horn Book!
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This is a masterpiece from start to finish. Jasper Rees writes with knowledge, understanding, great humour and greater humanity. I have played the horn on and off for a good few years. This book is packed with information, history, famous people, anecdotes, schooldays, music, lots more. The book is hard to put down once you start. You need no specialist knowledge to enjoy it hugely, but musicians, especially brass players, and horn players - always a breed apart - will get lasting insider-pleasure.
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I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT MUSIC
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Quirky? Yes. Funny? Yes. Inspirational? Certainly. Just for horn players? Absolutely not.
In fact it doesn't matter if you're tone deaf and know nothing about music. This is a book for anyone who has wondered what it would be like to follow an ambition, setting yourself an unfeasibly ridiculous target and seeing just where it takes you. And Jasper Rees does take us to some fairly strange places... unless you're a horn player that is.
On the author's journey we hear how his obsession with the instrument develops into a passion. But essentially it's a story of an ordinary bloke (with a refreshingly honest, self-mocking style) trying to do something bloody difficult and along the way we learn a lot about him and his instrument.
Music lovers will love the way this book has been so well researched but then so will musical ignoramuses like me and both will be equally entertained.
Try it. (The book, that is, but only the french horn if you really must.)
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A MUST FOR HORN PLAYERS
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When I started reading I soon realiized this was not a funny/silly book but although written in a light style it is serious study of modern horn playing today. I have been playing the horn for the past 40 years but there there was hardly a page I turned without learning somthing about the horn.
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