Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter De Vries

De Vries isn’t just roasting an instrument; he’s staging a little anatomical coup against musical pretension. Calling the tuba “the most intestinal of instruments” drags concert-hall dignity straight into the gut, where sound becomes something you don’t merely hear but physically process. The joke works because it’s not random gross-out: the tuba’s low register and breath-driven mechanics already invite bodily metaphors. It’s the instrument that seems to come from below the diaphragm, a column of air turned into a kind of sonic digestion.

The phrase “lower bowel of music” sharpens the satire. “Lower” is doing double duty: pitch and status. De Vries is lampooning the hierarchy embedded in orchestral culture, where soaring strings and bright brass get the glory while the foundation is treated as grunt work. By comparing that foundation to the least glamorous part of the body, he exposes how we mythologize “high” art by pretending it has no plumbing.

Subtextually, it’s also a defense disguised as insult. To assign the tuba a bodily function is to admit it’s essential: remove the lower bowel and the system fails. De Vries, a novelist with a comedian’s sense of the sacred and profane sharing the same room, is poking at the way culture sanitizes itself. He reminds us that music, like life, is powered by air, pressure, and the unromantic machinery we’d rather not mention. The tuba just refuses to let anyone forget.