Giving Amateurs an A for Effort

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.

“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.”

Jane and Carl Leaf, for example, are 10-year veterans of Chicago Master Singers, which 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.

“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.”

An elementary school music teacher, 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.”