Jasper Rees on NPR

A few days ago there was a tip posted on the horn list that Jasper Rees, the author of A Devil to Play (previously released in the UK as I Found My Horn) would be appearing on NPR this weekend. He wrote:

I thought I’d alert you to an interview I’ve done with the NPR music programme Studio 360 which will be posted on www.studio360.org and available as a podcast on iTunes from Thursday 7 May EST. It will broadcast on American public radio stations across the country over the weekend …. Health warning: I regret to say they made me take my horn to the studio. You may want to block your ears for that bit.

It really is a big deal to be on NPR, it should help his book sales.

Blog readers know that I have been giving his book a lot of thought the past week. At first I was in sort of a state of shock as I discovered Internet cut and paste plagiarism in the book, noted clearly in this post, which I took a bit personally as it was from materials on Franz Strauss that originally appeared in my Doctoral dissertation, a topic I began looking at as a project for my Masters degree and later also resulted in a CD on the Summit label and a full lecture-recital on the topic at the 35th International Horn Symposium (Bloomington, 2003-my handout is here).

With more than a week behind me now, at this point I have decided to move on. The timing of finding the plagiarism was good in the sense that it was a bit of a case study for college students working on papers right now, it is of a type that must happen all the time, but Rees did apologize (in the comments to the main post) and certainly understands the gravity of the “theft of words” and it is time to move on.

The NPR broadcast, found on this page or directly downloaded here, is a nice, short interview and should sell some books for him and his publisher. I do hope it helps in some way to promote the horn; Lord knows we need more horn players. I went to my nephew’s junior high band concert last night. Only four horns in the whole school, and I helped start two of them, my nephew and his friend! We all need to do our part to promote the horn.

Back to the book, I am still reading it and find it interesting. It reads easily and would I think be quite enjoyable if I were in his target audience, if I were for example someone that quit their musical study after high school or in college and was thinking of coming back. Do check out the podcast if you are thinking about this book.