Alan Heuer

Search for Harmony Alan Heuer

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.