The best way to describe Wayne Booth might be to say that had Abraham Lincoln lived to be 79, he would have looked a good deal like Booth: tall, lean, white-bearded, brow creased by a lifetime of thought.
Booth, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, is an internationally renowned literary theorist. But he is something else as well: a passionate amateur musician. For more than three decades, he has kept his soul in tune by playing the cello.
It is that fact, as much as the many books he has written and the many ideas he has placed in the world like torches along a dark path, that defines Booth. In his most recent book, “For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals” (University of Chicago Press), he argues on behalf of an often-denigrated and much-misunderstood figure in the arts: The amateur.
“The use of the word has somehow gotten corrupted,” Booth said on a recent morning in the Hyde Park home he shares with his wife, Phyllis, a psychotherapist-and an amateur violinist. “In sports, the amateur is the person who can’t make it professionally and is therefore, by definition, inferior.”
And in the arts, the “amateur” tag frequently is employed to designate bumbling ineptitude leavened by almost pathetically earnest effort. To call someone an amateur anything–musician, composer, dancer, singer, writer–is, in effect, to pat her or him on the head and say, “Keep at it, kiddo. Maybe someday–who knows?”
Booth’s book is an eloquent dissent. The word “amateur,” he reminds readers, derives from the conjugation of the Latin verb “amo, amas, amat”: to love. The bad odor that arises from it these days, the nose-wrinkling notion of “merely incompetent dallying,” as Booth puts it, is a comparatively recent phenomenon, and one Europeans don’t seem to buy.
In many parts of Europe, as Chicago Symphony Orchestra conductor Daniel Barenboim has noted, amateurism is celebrated, even revered. The idea of devoted, inspired amateurs who return home from their jobs each evening to spend several hours playing music with fellow aficionados is a profoundly important one, providing the foundation for a shared culture.
But in America, if you’re not paid for an activity, the assumption is that you’re no good at it. Money is the measure of all things.
That irks Booth and many others, including Alan Heatherington, director of Chicago Master Singers, a 21-year-old amateur choral group, as well as Tony Vezner and Jeffrey Arena, the artistic and managing directors of Theatre of Western Springs, an amateur theater group established in 1929.
The paid directors of those highly regarded arts institutions are reluctant to use the word “amateur,” they said, because of its instantly negative connotation–a prejudice that blinds people to the passion, pride and skill with which their colleagues undertake their work.
“With the Master Singers, we avoid using the word `amateur’ because it suggests that it’s not very good, that it’s one step above a bad church choir,” said Heatherington, who also directs two professional groups: the Lake Forest and Ars Viva symphonies. “But when we go on tour in Europe, I can use the word `amateur’ because they know that these are trained musicians, that this is a serious commitment.”
Arena said, “We’ve discussed at our board meetings the issue of using the word `amateur’ because of how it sounds.”
Vezner added, “To me, the question really is not what you’re called, but what level of quality you bring.”
Yet one mention of the word “amateur” and many people tend to envision dabblers, hobbyists, dilettantes, those who flit from one pastime to the next, never becoming proficient. That is far from the experience of Booth with his cello, or Jane and Carl Leaf with their singing, or Charron Traut and Fred Sauers with their acting.
Booth often is accompanied by his wife on the violin, and by their musically inclined friends. That experience, Phyllis Booth said, bestows almost magical gifts.
“There is a lot of new research about how babies develop their brains. There is evidence the baby’s brain doesn’t develop unless there is another brain interacting with it. We’re talking about the mother and baby being in tune emotionally,” she said. “That’s what we’re doing when we’re playing. We’re matching each others’ moods.”
Booth and his wife sat at the dining room table in their home on a recent morning, a day made gray and a little somber by intermittent rain. In one corner, gripped securely in its upright case, was Booth’s cello; it was a benevolent presence in the room, like a wise old friend.
Several nights before, Booth recalled, he had been feeling a trifle melancholy. “I’m writing an autobiography, and the day had gone badly. There were lots of interruptions, e-mail and one thing and another. Phyllis suggested we play some duets. “Suddenly the music was there, and I thought, `I’m back.’ All the tension disappeared. You totally lose track of ordinary time. When you come out of it, you think, `Has it been a half an hour? An hour?’ You don’t know.”
`I do it because I love it’
Jane Leaf is enthusiastic about many things–her children, her teaching, her Palatine neighborhood, the family dog Gus and cat Moses. But when she talks about choral music, she becomes positively incandescent.
“Being in the choral sound, being part of that choral sound, is just wonderful. When everything is right, it just rings true in my body,” she said, adding with a laugh, “I’m just a choral-sound junkie.”
Jane and her husband, Carl Leaf, are 10-year veterans of Chicago Master Singers, a distinguished choral group that performs concerts throughout the year. They have been to Europe three times with the group. Jane sings alto; Carl, baritone.
For the Leafs, singing is not just a hobby, not simply a casual pursuit that they wedge into their lives at convenient times. They rehearse three nights a week and perform on weekends. Like everyone in the group, they must audition each year and are constantly learning new music, constantly working to improve. Their love for what they do radiates in their voices and their faces when they talk about it, as they did on a recent evening in their home.
Gus and Moses, after giving a visitor a few preliminary sniffs, waited patiently off to one side.
“I don’t use the word `amateur’ too much,” Jane Leaf said. “This is a very high level. This isn’t sitting around the piano singing songs. I do it because I love it. There’s something really magical about it.”
A music teacher at Hunting Ridge Elementary School in Palatine, Jane Leaf said she tries to instill that same love of music in her students. “It’s something they will be able to do their whole lives. You can’t play football your whole life, or so many other things. Your body limits you. But music can always be there.”
She and her husband met when both were students at Augustana College–and singing in the choir.
Carl Leaf, who works as a physical therapist, used those undergraduate years to choose between an amateur and professional music career. His brother, Sven, chose the latter; he has been a singer with the Metropolitan Opera in New York for almost 30 years.
“I decided not to pursue music as a career, as my brother had, even though my college choir director was always trying to talk me into it. He’d say, `Carl, you’ve got it!’ But I thought it would destroy my love of it, if it was my job.”
Both said that rehearsals, not performances, were where the magic really blossomed.
“Rehearsing is where it’s at,” Carl Leaf said. “Frankly, I’d be in the group just to go to the rehearsal. We’re doing this for ourselves, not for the audience.
“It’s a higher level of existence for me. You’re participating in the actual creation of something,” he continued. “You’re re-creating what the composer had in his mind, and creating it anew for fresh ears and fresh minds.”
Heatherington, interviewed separately, said the current implication of the “amateur” label is simply wrong when applied to the Master Singers.
“They sing with phenomenal discipline. These people are there because they want to perform at their highest level of excellence. There’s so much passion. It’s never relegated to the status of a job. It’s never routine.
“They are there for the encounter with art, which is something grand and wonderful and beyond themselves.”
Conversely, some professionals he knows, Heatherington said, leave music in their middle years because that passion–the passion of the amateur–has fled. “It just doesn’t do for them what it once did.”
`It makes me what I am’
If you hadn’t been told before you met her that Charron Traut was an actress, you’d figure it out in about 10 seconds. She has a vivid presence marked by a rich, husky voice; slender fingers that tell a story alongside her sentences; and an extraordinarily mobile face framed by soft scallops of light reddish hair.
“When someone uses the word `amateur,’ I always say, `What do you mean by that?'” said Traut. She leaned forward in her seat, one of the red-backed ones in the mainstage of the Theatre of Western Springs, a community theater in the western suburb.
The large theater was empty except for Traut, fellow actor Fred Sauers, a reporter and a member of the theater’s technical crew, who was dismantling the set of “Pride and Prejudice,” which recently concluded its run.
An empty theater can be a dauntingly sad place, but not with Traut and Sauers in the house. This is a second home for them, and their comfort is contagious. Both have been performing in plays at the venue since the 1960s, and both have had both professional and amateur theatrical experience.
Their verdict: amateur rules.
“I had worked in professional theater all my life. Coming here, at first I hesitated,” said Traut. She and her husband had moved to Western Springs to raise their children. “I thought, `Oh, my God.’ But then I saw a production.”
The high quality of the performances astonished her, Traut said, and the parameters of the word “amateur” expanded in her mind. “If you’ve been in theater all your life, it’s what you want to do. It makes me what I am.”
Sauers, a retired data processor with a long, loose-limbed body, occasionally works in professional productions. But he returns to the Theatre of Western Springs to restore himself, he said.
“This group is unique because people come here and stay. It demands that you pay attention to what you do. They’re not casual.
“We don’t use the word `amateur’ in this country anymore, except to belittle,” he said. “I don’t characterize myself as an `amateur’ actor.”
A few moments later, fellow actor Karen Holbert stopped by. She, too, has acted professionally, but enjoys her work at the Theatre of Western Springs, which she joined in 1995.
“Everyone here loves the theater,” Holbert said. “It’s enhanced by the fact that people have nothing to gain except personal fulfillment.”
And the difference between amateurs and professionals? “Plenty of people with lots of talent haven’t pursued it professionally. And some professionals,” she added ruefully, “aren’t all that talented.”
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The Chicago Master Singers perform Sunday and throughout the holiday season at Divine Word Chapel in Techny. For information about future concerts, call 847-604-1067.
The Theatre of Western Springs’ next production, “Shadowlands,” opens Jan. 25. For more information, call 708-246-3380.
