What to do with all that music, when you finally, reluctantly, stop playing? At 99, Phyllis Booth (violin/viola, Chicago) stared at her bookcase full of chamber music.  She had been playing violin and viola since childhood and had studied music in college. Her husband, Wayne Booth, had taken up the cello in his early 30’s so he could play with her. The Booths played together – and sometimes separately – till Wayne’s death in 2005, at age 84. By that time, they had added late Beethoven and Bartok quartets to their expanding repertoire. They played with friends in Chicago, at workshops at home and abroad, and with musicians they found all over the world through the ACMP directory. More than 50 years of playing had built a large, well-loved chamber music collection.

A summer, 2025 visit from Jane Leland (viola/violin, Wilmette, IL), a more-than-music-friend, got Phyllis thinking about gifting the music library to Golden Chamber Music at Sleepy Hollow (known to regulars as just “Sleepy Hollow”), a twice a year weekend chamber music gathering in South Haven, Michigan. A central music library would be useful for the gatherings and passing her music on to new generations of players would be part of her legacy. The Booth’s long, joyful connection to the Sleepy Hollow weekends began a few years after the original gathering in 1969, and Phyllis was still attending in 2019, the 50th anniversary. Sleepy Hollow is purely recreational. String players, a few pianists, and occasional winds gather for a long weekend and play in groups mixed and matched by the organizers. It currently has no coaches or performances and does not accept preformed groups. What music you play depends on who has signed up, and the Booth library had plenty of trios, quartets, quintets and sextets.

Phyllis and Wayne were the kind of chamber musicians everyone wants to play with: communicative, responsive, and musically generous. They played because they loved making music with friends – and making friends through music. Both had other professions. After initially planning a career as a school music teacher, Phyllis chose clinical psychology and worked with children and families in nursery schools. She is one of the founders of Theraplay, a method for helping families build better attachments through play, wrote two books about it, and lectured throughout the world.

Wayne was a professor of English.  While he was slogging through the rat race of his first academic job at Haverford College, Phyllis was having all the fun, playing chamber music at night with new friends.  Wayne enjoyed listening to music, but Phyllis was going out in the world and making music. He wanted in. After some rough calculations of the Haydn Op. 64 No. 5 quartet’s last movement, he chose the cello. It had fewer notes and more rests than the other parts.  

We know all this about Wayne because among his many scholarly books and essays on subjects like literary criticism, rhetoric, and ethics, there is an intimately personal book about his journey as an amateur cellist. “For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals” rescues the term “amateur” from its “unskilled” and second-rate connotations and returns it to its Latin origin, the word “amator” or lover.  Wayne’s book describes, with considerable humor and humility, the formidable challenges of learning the cello as an adult.  It also examines human craving for love, fun, and connection, and describes how the labor of learning to play the cello well enough to do it with other musicians proved to be much more than an escape from the demands of work. Making music with others, reaching together for that elusive, unattainable goal, and occasionally soaring very close, all for the love of it, is a window to a whole different dimension of life itself.

Phyllis’s donation of their chamber music and scores to Sleepy Hollow captured the spirit described in Wayne’s book. She designed a dedication plate for the music with the inscription “Gift of Wayne and Phyllis Booth: FOR THE LOVE OF IT” in the same font as the cover of Wayne’s book.

Several Sleepy Hollow regulars and Phyllis fans met three times at her home to paste 400 labels into the music, catalogue, and box it while sharing food and memories. Phyllis joined the September 2025 Sleepy Hollow session of 45 players by Zoom.  She talked about her and Wayne’s history playing chamber music, including at Sleepy Hollow – the music, the adventure, the sense of community, and the life-long friendships they had formed.  She emphasized how pleased she was for the gift of music to be part of her legacy.

Participants were moved by Phyllis’s reflections. The old timers who know her were delighted to see her again and chat afterwards.  Newer participants felt her history and presence provided a warm sense of continuity to the Sleepy Hollow community. In Phyllis’s words, “when we play together, we are really connecting.” Chamber music is also about communication and trust, themes so central to both Phyllis’s life work and the message of Wayne’s book. Their tangible gift of music For The Love Of It captures the timelessness of what we all cherish about making music together.