from Starship Troopers

I haven't been able to play much recently due to an injury to my upper lip, plus getting some horrible sickness, so little trombonery content from yours truly today. In lieu of that, I wanted to share an interesting passage that I encountered in Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (pages 77-78), an unlikely place to read about the role of amateur musicians in society. For those of you unfamiliar with the book, this passage comes from when our narrator is a fresh recruit in boot camp in a futuristic society, training to fight against an alien invasion force. I found this passage particularly striking.

It’s nice to have the band play; it picks you right up when your tail is dragging the prairie. We hadn’t had anything but canned music at first and that only for parade and calls. But the powers-that-be had found out early who could play and who couldn’t; instruments were provided and a regimental band was organized, all our own – even the director and the drum major were boots.

It didn’t mean they got out of anything. Oh no! It just meant they were allowed and encouraged to do it on their own time, practicing evenings and Sundays and such – and that they got to strut and countermarch and show off at parade instead of being in ranks with their platoons.

(…)

We couldn’t take a parade band out on route march, of course, because no special allowances were made for the band. Tubas and bass drums had to stay behind because a boy in the band had to carry a full kit, same as everybody, and could only manage an instrument small enough to add to his load. But the M.I. has band instruments which I don’t believe anybody else has, such as a little box hardly bigger than a harmonica, an electric gadget which does an amazing job of faking a big horn and is played the same way. Come band call when you are headed for the horizon, each bandsman sheds his kit without stopping, his squadmates split it up, and he trots to the column position of the color company and starts blasting.

It helps.

Book Review – A Devil To Play, Jasper Rees

I was drawn to this book by the cover – an old-fashioned French horn with a man’s head peering out of the bell with a look of utter confusion on his face. Having experienced utter confusion regarding the French horn many times in my life, I immediately picked up this book and could not have been more delighted by it.

This is the story of a British journalist’s journey to re-learn the French horn in the throes of a mid-life crisis. His plan: to perform a Mozart Horn Concerto before an audience of trained horn professionals at the annual meeting of the British Horn Society after not having even held or thought about the horn for twenty-five years.

The book details Rees’s journey in full. He introduces us to contemporary horn masters who he unabashedly seeks out and consults while he’s learning – frankly, I admire the man’s balls in doing so, walking up to the horn section of the Royal Philharmonic as a complete amateur and introducing himself like an established colleague. I suppose Rees’s journalism career trained him for this sort of behavior, because I cannot imagine doing anything like it myself.

There is also a smattering of intriguing historical information about the French horn, particularly Mozart’s compositions for the instrument and the backstory there. Rees tells us about the use of the horn in prehistoric times, in hunting parties, and as a developing orchestral instrument. Some of his historical information is couched in pure historical fiction, but all told in Rees’s endearingly self-deprecating style.

The book winds up with a narration of his performance at his big concert, a flurry of sentences in a highly emotionally-charged passage which lets us into his very thoughts as he performs the concerto. As I read it, I felt my own pulse racing as though I were standing there myself – it brought back memories of the adrenaline rushes of recitals past.

Even if you’re not a horn player or have never picked up a musical instrument in your life, this book is worth a read. Rees reminds his readers of what it’s like to be passionately devoted to something – no, to be ridiculously obsessed with it – to the point that you succeed at doing what you thought was impossible.