Mark Twain on Music

Subject: Mark Twain on Music
From: *daylia*
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 09:30 AM

I'd like to share this quote I found about music in Mark Twain's Recollections of Joan of Arc yesterday;

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magicians, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.

I started a thread called Music is The Word? some time ago. It made for some interesting discussion. Twain's words seem to harmonize with these esoteric ideas about music and "Creation" so perfectly!

Rather than add more posts to that bulky older thread, I thought I'd start this one in case anyone would like to comment. And here's a couple more Twainisms for your contemplative enjoyment ....

We often feel sad in the presence of music without words, and often more than that in the presence of music without music.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927

I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument, and an unsuspected yearning to learn to play on it, that are bound to wake up and demand attention some day. Therefore, you who rail at such as disturb your slumbers with unseccessful and demoralizing attempts of subjugate a fiddle beware! for sooner or later you own time will come.
-"A Touching Story of George Washington's Boyhood".

Yours musically,

daylia

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 11:31 AM

Mark Twain is also famous for saying "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."

I see that someone used the phrase "Better Than It Sounds" as the title of a musical program. Click here.

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: alanabit
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 12:13 PM

There are some lovely comments about music he disliked in, "A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur". I believe that he actually decided to hang the composer after one particularly good dinner! Mark Twain could be funny on just about any subject. He had plenty of good asides on music too.
Just as funny, is a collection of pieces by George Bernard Shaw, called,"How to be a Music Critic". He spent some time in that profession and his wit was not wasted. Unfortunately, it is usually the destructive and rude comments which are the funniest. It seems to be more difficult to be funny about someone when you are being kind to them.

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 12:21 PM

As a banjo player (among other things) I particularly like this one:


THE BANJO

When you want genuine music--music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose,--when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

- "Enthusiastic Eloquence," San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 6/23/1865

Mark Twain played the banjo, incidentally, though I have no idea how well.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: *daylia*
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 02:06 PM

Great quotes! :-) Interesting program, too. Thanks, jim.

I agree, alanabit - humour is so often more than just a little bit tragic. Maybe people who suffer such profound depth of perception into society, into human nature require that deep sense of humour as well, just to keep their balance. I'm glad it seemed to work that way for Mark Twain!

Mark Twain played the banjo, incidentally, though I have no idea how well.

Hmmm, if it was his own attempts to subjugate a banjo that "suffused your system like strychnine whisky", then ...

... but then again, is it possible to play a banjo less than "well", Dave??? ;-)

Mark Twain played the piano too - in light of your quote, possibly at great risk to the piano?

daylia

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 02:47 PM

Ahhh...poor deluded daylaya.

In the later years of his his earthly wisdom (tempered by deaths, diseases, taxes and copyright violators) our beloved Mr. Clemmons wrote the following.

Mark and Music?

Excepted from Mark Twains "Letters From the Earth" - Letter #2

The human race ... has invented a heaven out of its own head!

In man's heaven everybody sings! The man who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not sing on earth is able to do it there. The universal singing is not casual, not occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on, all day long, and every day, during a stretch of twelve hours. And everybody stays; whereas in the earth the place would be empty in two hours. The singing is of hymns alone. Nay, it is of one hymn alone. The words are always the same, in number they are only about a dozen, there is no rhyme, there is no poetry: "Hosannah, hosannah, hosannah, Lord God of Sabaoth, 'rah! 'rah! 'rah! siss! -- boom! ... a-a-ah!"

Meantime, every person is playing on a harp -- those millions and millions! -- whereas not more than twenty in the thousand of them could play an instrument in the earth, or ever wanted to.

Consider the deafening hurricane of sound -- millions and millions of voices screaming at once and millions and millions of harps gritting their teeth at the same time! I ask you: is it hideous, is it odious, is it horrible?

All sane white people hate noise; yet they have tranquilly accepted this kind of heaven -- without thinking, without reflection, without examination -- and they actually want to go to it!

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

Sort of resembles the Mudcat - where he who shouts most is the "authority" on everything from prison cells to APB announcements on stolen instruments.

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: GUEST,Clint Keller
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 02:56 PM

That's a criticism of some people's heaven, not a criticism of music.

Poor illiterate gargoyle.

I couldn't read the blue type,even highlighted. Thank God.

clint

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: GUEST,*daylia*
Date: 30 Aug 04 - 04:43 PM

Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all His work must be contemplated with respect.

- Mark Twain, a Biography

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: GUEST,Fred Bailey
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 08:31 AM

From where do I remember the quote:

"There wasn't much in the way of entertainment" (in a small town), "but what there was was greatly appreciated."

Pretty sure it's a Mark Twain

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: GUEST,Arkie
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 08:57 AM

This is supposedly from Mark Twain also.

"We consider that the man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia reels without losing his grip may be depended upon in any kind of emergency."
                                                                      - Mark Twain

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: Midchuck
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 09:28 AM

I think the President has based his entire re-election strategy on one line from Huckleberry Finn:

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?

And it'll probably work.

Peter.

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: robomatic
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 10:00 AM

Speaking of Presidents, and this one a friend in later life of Mark Twain, who saved him from financial ruin, U.S. Grant represented himself as very inexpert on music. He only knew two tunes. One of them was Yankee Doodle, and the other wasn't!

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: GUEST,Ole Bull
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 11:03 AM

Twain was a big fan of the Minstrel Show, of which the Banjo was the icon. Makes sense, for the National Author to be attracted to what many extolled to be the National Music.

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: Mark Ross
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 03:08 PM

Actually, I understand that Twain plyed the guitar, owned a rather fine Martin, if the book on Martin guitars is to be believed.

Mark Ross

Subject: RE: Mark Twain on Music
From: GUEST,*daylia*
Date: 31 Aug 04 - 04:03 PM

You could be right about that Martin, Mark - click here.

That's a criticism of some people's heaven, not a criticism of music.

I agree, Clint. Here's a similiar quote to the one Gargoyle posted;

The inventor of their heaven empties into it all the nations of the earth, in one common jumble. All are on an equality absolute, no one of them ranking another; they have to be "brothers"; they have to mix together, pray together, harp together, hosannah together--whites, niggers, Jews, everybody--there's no distinction.

Here in the earth all nations hate each other, and every one of them hates the Jew. Yet every pious person adores that heaven and wants to get into it. He really does. And when he is in a holy rapture he thinks he thinks that if he were only there he would take all the populace to his heart, and hug, and hug, and hug!

- Letters from the Earth