I Found my Horn is the story of an obsession with the French Horn, and where acting on a whim can lead you. It has many elements: an eccentric love story, the diary of a midlife crisis, a public-school memoir, a left-field travel book, incorporating a set of celebrity interviews. It is essentially the chronicle of a mid-life makeover which has the tension of a thriller. There have been technical books for specialists on playing the horn, books on classical composers, even a biography of Dennis Brain, the greatest horn player of the 20th century. But there has been no book about an ordinary person's love of and struggles with any musical instrument, let alone the horn. Jasper Rees took the instrument up again, 22 years after giving it up on leaving school. The book heads towards a specific goal: a public performance. The task Jasper set himself was to perform a Mozart concerto at the British Horn Society festival at the Guildhall, exactly one year after he first took up the instrument at the same event - then he played the Hallelujah chorus in a 70-string massed horn ensemble. A year on, he is performing solo at the horn equivalent of the FA Cup final. This is the story of how he did it (or did not!).

Author Biography

Jasper Rees has been a journalist since 1988. He has written over the years for most broadsheets, but principally the Daily Telegraph, Independent, Evening Standard and The Times. Previous titles: None.