Music and the Reed Organ in the Life of Mark Twain

Abstract

The rural and small-town experiences of his youth, coupled with those of his years as a river pilot, formed a fertile resource on which he drew repeatedly; and it is significant that the farther he departed from this material, the less successful, from a literary point of view, his work became. Anyone who reads far in Twain's oeuvre will be struck by his frequent references to music, for he was an amateur musician of sorts and, within certain bounds, something of a critic. Possessed of a melodious tenor voice and proficient enough at the piano to play the music he liked, his interest in the art was lifelong. His love for music, like the material from which sprang his greatest literary works, derived from his youth: the spirituals, jubilees, chants, and folksongs learned from his uncle's slaves formed the basis of his musical understanding for the rest of his life. It was also during his youth that he must have made his acquaintance with the piano, for his family owned an instrument, and his sister Pamela gave lessons.' Oddly enough, in later life he keenly felt the contrast between his own literary works drawn from early sources and that of his contemporaries, to his disadvantage. He never felt quite at home with the literati of his day, and, when he essayed their more polished and genteel style the result, while not outright failure, nevertheless fell short of his best efforts. His attempts to gain upper-class acceptance for his work and to conform to what he considered socially acceptable levels was lifelong, and his efforts in the field of literature were paralleled by similar musical aspirations. It is significant that when he surveyed his supposed failure, he called forth the shade of the humble reed organ of his youth: Honestly, I never cared what became of the cultured classes; they could go to the theater and the opera, they had no use for me and the melodeon.2 Twain's life (1835-1910) spanned the period that saw the rise and decline of the