Search for Harmony

About the Book

Music and Amtrak bring a young cowboy from his starkly serene landscape of Wyoming to the bustling cacophony of New York City, where he confronts a camouflaged tough, a potential curbside swindler, unsolicited cabby advice, a confounded motel security guard, and New York's never ending need to empty his pockets. The cowboy, knowing little of New York and its challenges to fresh wide-eyed newcomers, finds security and solace in his steady refuge-his clarinet-an instrument that also serves our hero as a magical weapon to disarm a the young tough while also plying his mysterious talent to lure other young lovers into deeper romance, as he himself continues his search for love and harmony.

The musical-cowboy theme in this irresistible page-turner is the leitmotif tying together the plot's theme with delightful variation. The story's structure is a music metaphor comprised of 4 sections in 3 parts, with an opening theme and a coda finale. The cowboy's search for harmony accelerates rhythmically from detailed drawn-out events to less detailed accelerated events-almost stretto, a musical device to keep a listener's attention as the author's drama plays on. There's a false cadence (or false ending) in the middle of the story where our cowboy hero seems to have found harmony at last, only to realize it's not the real thing.

About the Author

ALAN HEUER had to put SEARCH FOR HARMONY to music. His grandfather played sousaphone with John Philip Sousa, his grandmother played Vaudeville in Chicago, his mother plays flute and piano, and his father builds harpsichords in Wyoming. The rhythmic prose of SEARCH FOR HARMONY is itself a music metaphor.