I Found My Horn

One Man's Struggle With The Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument

Jasper Rees

Most people who take up a musical instrument have dropped it by the time they leave school. With the onset of maturity they start to regret giving it up. But still they do nothing about it. At the age of 39 and three quarters, Jasper Rees did do something about it. He fished his French horn out of the attic, where it had lain silent for 22 years, and took it to the instrument's annual jamboree: the British Horn Society festival. Along with 69 other horn players, he stood onstage and played Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. There and then, despite severely limited ability, he set himself a near impossible target: to stand up in front of a paying audience in twelve months' time and play a Mozart concerto. Alone. 'I Found My Horn' is the story of a midlife crisis spent not on a Harley Davidson but on 18 feet of wrapped brass tubing. It is also the story of man's first musical instrument, and its journey from the walls of Jericho to Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, from the hunting fields of aristocratic France to the heart of Hollywood. Along the way, Jasper Rees seeks expert advice as he prepares to stand up in front of a packed London auditorium and perform a Mozart concerto on this notoriously treacherous instrument. Everyone says the same thing. Don't do it.