A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument

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Chapter One

In the Beginning was the Horn

When the horne bloweth: then let them come up in to the mounten.
—Exodus 19:13, Tyndale Bible

In the year before I took up the French horn again, an important finding was made about the universe. Scientists at the University of Ulm in Germany, analyzing patterns of hot and cold blobs observed by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, were able to confirm that the universe is finite. The same conclusion had recently been posited by scientists at Montana State University, who contended that space is shaped like a ball. The research of their rivals at Ulm proved that it isn't anything so banal as a sphere. According to their model, the universe narrows at one end to an infinitely distant vanishing point, while at the other it curves outward, though not forever. If a spaceship were to travel toward the expanded end, it would at some putative point hit a wall and be deflected back in the opposite direction.

Narrow at one end, curving out into a wide flare at the other? Only one answer seems possible. The universe, far from being spherical, is conical. It exists in the shape of a horn.

I grew up, at least at the weekends, beneath the South Downs in West Sussex. The oldest building in what you'd scarcely call a village goes back to 1680. No one really knows for sure, but our home is of roughly the same vintage. So if it was built in the 1680s, it belongs to the same decade as the births of Handel and Bach, who between them would give the horn itsfirst orchestral employment.

The cottage was more burrow than house. Once you rose to anywhere near six foot, you had to duck in and out of the sitting room to avoid thudding your head on the door frame. You also had to watch out for a low beam slung across the middle of the room. We are mostly male in my family, mostly six foot or thereabouts. (I am five foot eleven and three-quarters.) We all stoop.

The pockmarked bricks of the hearth were the oldest part of the house. Across the fireplace there was a shiny brass smoke screen in which you could pull faces and watch them wobble and distort back at you. Above, mounted on nails banged into the brick, was a collection of old hunting horns. There was a short round one and, on the other side, a short straight one. Then there was a longer straight one, the kind that often have pennants draped from them and are used to announce the arrival of a royal personage. Running across the top of the wall was the eye-catcher, a magnificent straight horn four feet in length. It had, so far as I could tell, no practical application unless you were planning to summon your two brothers to a medieval joust in the garden. But the centerpiece, the instrument that drew the eye, was a slender round horn of perhaps fifteen inches in diameter. Were you to unwrap its coils, it would be just as long as the magnificent straight horn. It had a small bell, and no valves or slides. But this, manifestly, was an ancestor of the instrument I took up on March 12, 1975.

I hardly ever went near any of them. Occasionally there'd be visitors to whom, as part of a range of hosting duties, we would feel obliged to show off. In such an instance the horns came in handy. The ritual was always the same. We'd start with the smallest and work our way up to the magnificent straight horn. This would be the finale. And now, ladies and gentlemen. That was the idea, anyway, but it was more or less impossible to tease any form of note out of the two small horns, so mostly we just fought over the bigger horns. We were always genuinely surprised at how difficult it was to extract a presentable noise.

But then these horns weren't designed to sound beautiful. In the preorchestral phase of its life, the horn's job was to talk to the animals, or the army, or the enemy. Unlike the lyre, the dulcimer, or the lute—at home we also had one of those—it wasn't allowed to bring its muddy boots through the front door. There was no music written for it. It just had to sound loud.

On Saturdays in winter we had firsthand evidence of this. My parents were members of that section of the population that likes to chase small quadrupeds while seated on the back of a large one. In due course my older brother became a willing recruit. He donned the jodhpurs, the tweed jacket, the domed peaked hat, and perched pertly on the back of some sedated pony. My younger brother and I were refuseniks. We kept well away from the saddle. There was no keeping our distance altogether. When we were too young to object, we were taken to the meet. The setting was always the same. On top of each horse was a person in uniform: black coat with yellow collar, hard riding hat, whip, coarsely woven white gloves, cravat and pin, knee-high leather boots. Two of these ¬people would be our parents. Perhaps because he spent his week in London, my father seemed determined to go as native as possible at the weekend. He took to wearing a top hat, and even a pink coat. (Pink, as in red. One of the peculiarities of hunting folk is a selective form of color blindness. They also ticked you off if you referred to a white horse as "white." They were always "gray.") Everyone else was straight out of central casting, even the foot followers in black Wellingtons, brown trousers, and sensible windcheaters. The ladies wore silk headscarves. The men's cheeks were rouged by wind and wine. The scene can have changed very little since the 1680s: the red-brick inn, the naked trees, the sodden earth underfoot, loamy rural vowels in harmonious counterpoint to the clipped, peremptory consonants of the mounted well-to-do. There was only one thing that firmly carbon-dated the scene to the early 1970s: the massively flared jeans worn by my little brother and me as we stood, a glass of warm lemonade in our hands, sulking to one side in our own hermetically sealed boredom.