For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, 2008 M04 15 - 248 pages
For the Love of It is a story not only of one intimate struggle between a man and his cello, but also of the larger struggle between a society obsessed with success and individuals who choose challenging hobbies that yield no payoff except the love of it.

"If, in truth, Booth is an amateur player now in his fifth decade of amateuring, he is certainly not an amateur thinker about music and culture. . . . Would that all of us who think and teach and care about music could be so practical and profound at the same time."—Peter Kountz, New York Times Book Review

"[T]his book serves as a running commentary on the nature and depth of this love, and all the connections it has formed in his life. . . . The music, he concludes, has become part of him, and that is worth the price."—Clea Simon, Boston Globe

"The book will be read with delight by every well-meaning amateur who has ever struggled. . . . Even general readers will come away with a valuable lesson for living: Never mind the outcome of a possibly vain pursuit; in the passion that is expended lies the glory."—John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune

"Hooray for amateurs! And huzzahs to Wayne Booth for honoring them as they deserve. For the Love of It celebrates amateurism with genial philosophizing and pointed cultural criticism, as well as with personal reminiscences and self-effacing wit."—James Sloan Allen, USA Today

"Wayne Booth, the prominent American literary critic, has written the only sustained study of the interior experience of musical amateurism in recent years, For the Love of It. [It] succeeds as a meditation on the tension between the centrality of music in Booth's life, both inner and social, and its marginality. . . . It causes the reader to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the pleasures involved in making music; the satisfaction in playing well, the pride one takes in learning a difficult piece or passage or technique, the buzz in one's fingertips and the sense of completeness with the bow when the turn is done just right, the pleasure of playing with others, the comfort of a shared society, the joy of not just hearing, but making, the music, the wonder at the notes lingering in the air."—Times Literary Supplement

From inside the book

Contents

OVERTURE What Is an Amateur and Why Amateuring Matters
3
FIRST MOVEMENT The Courtship
19
SECOND MOVEMENT The Marriage
67
THIRD MOVEMENT The Love Fulfilled
129
FOURTH MOVEMENT Rising Dissonance Resolved to Heavenly Harmony
171
Glossary
211
Bibliography
215
Index
227
Copyright

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Popular passages

Page 192 - From harmony, from heavenly harmony This universal frame began : From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man.
Page 207 - SINCE I am coming to that Holy roome, Where, with thy Quire of Saints for evermore, I shall be made thy Musique; As I come I tune the Instrument here at the dore, And what I must doe then, thinke here before.
Page 2 - But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in sight.
Page 208 - Sphears ; for those well-ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.
Page 207 - Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society. How strange that all The terrors, pains, and early miseries, Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused Within my mind, should e'er have borne a part, And that a needful part, in making up The calm existence that is mine when I Am worthy of myself!
Page 84 - Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
Page vi - I cannot say that they act and re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each other: Yet doubtless there is a communication between them of some kind, and my opinion rather is that there is something in it more of the manner of electrified bodies, — and that by means of the heated parts of the rider, which come immediately into contact with the back of the HOBBY-HORSE.
Page 68 - There is nothing, I think, in which the power of art is shown so much as in playing on the fiddle. In all other things we can do something at first. Any man will forge a bar of iron, if you give him a hammer ; not so well as a smith, but tolerably. A man will saw a piece of wood, and make a box, though a clumsy one ; but give him a fiddle and a fiddle-stick, and he can do nothing.
Page 108 - THAT time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie...

About the author (2008)

Wayne C. Booth (1921–2005) was the George Pullman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. His many books include The Rhetoric of Fiction, A Rhetoric of Irony, The Power and Limits of Pluralism, The Vocation of a Teacher, and Forthe Love of It, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

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