A Devil to Play Quotes

“The horn . . . is the joint hardest instrument to learn. . . . (The other is the oboe).”
― Jasper Rees, A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument

“By the age of eleven it was . . . too late for the piano and the violin.”
― Jasper Rees, A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument

“[W]ithout travelling one remains a poor creature; that goes especially for people in the arts and sciences! [Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart]”
― Jasper Rees, A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument

“Suddenly I am swept back in time, like someone tumbling down one of those laundry chutes in the movies, to a feeling I last had when I was not yet an adult. I recall immediately that there is nothing quite like it. I am a small part of a huge elemental force. A torrent of man-made sound swirls around and through me. It ferrets under me and seems to raise me. It is almost impossible not to burst out laughing at the sheer exhilaration of it. All that music, all that unison.”
― Jasper Rees, A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument