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Tardily last year, Matt Seybold published his research on Mark Twain'southward "music of merciful release," a series of compositions past classical composers which Sam Clemens listened to repeatedly as part of his grieving procedure after the deaths of his married woman and daughters.

The essay was a culmination of years of engagement with Twain and music, including multiple collaborations with the Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes. Among them was a performance at the celebrated Park Church in Elmira of "Mark Twain's Music Box," a program inspired by Kerry Driscoll's 2008 essay with that title.

At the 2019 Summer Teachers Plant, Dr. Seybold read from his work-in-progress. Among the teachers in omnipresence was Erin Bartram, who had just joined the staff of the Marker Twain Firm & Museum in Hartford. Equally she describes in this new episode of The American Vandal Podcast, Dr. Bartram used her notes from the session to create "Marker Twain'due south Emo Playlist," a soundtrack for her piece of work as the Twain House to which she continually added new tracks based on musical references she found in the writings of Sam Clemens and his family unit members.

Late final year, Dr. Bartram led the launch of Make Music With Mark Twain!, an outreach program for Chiliad-12 students who explore near how music was produced and consumed by the Clemens household and apply what they learn to create compositions of their own.

Inspired by her research for Make Music With Mark Twain!, Dr. Bartram suggested to Sarah Kaufold, the creative manager of the chamber ensemble Voices of Concinnity, that they tape a masked and socially distanced version of Dan Forrest's "Adept Night, Dear Center" on the porch at the Twain Firm. "Skillful Night, Dear Center" draws its lyrics from the poem which Sam Clemens chose for the inscription on his daughter's tombstone at Woodlawn Cemetary in Elmira. That recording was released in January post-obit a roundtable with Bartram, Kaufold, and Seybold.

In this episode, Bartram, Driscoll, and Seybold come up together to discuss the cantankerous-pollinating enquiry they take been doing in recent years, every bit well as the many avenues for further engaging the complex musical tastes of Marking Twain and his family.

Erin Bartram is Schoolhouse Programs Coordinator at the Mark Twain House & Museum, where she recently launched the Make Music with Marking Twain! Program. She has previously taught at University of Hartford and University of Connecticut, where she received her PhD in History. She is the founding editor of Contingent Mag, and has also published in Relate of College Education, The Washington Post, Religion & American Culture, and Common-place.

Kerry Driscoll is currently an Editor for the Marking Twain Project at UC-Berkeley. She is also Professor Emerita at University of St. Joseph. She is the writer of Mark Twain Among The Indians & Other Indigenous Peoples (University of California Press, 2019) and numerous essays on Twain and other U.Southward. authors in journals like American Literary Realism, William Carlos Williams Review, and Marking Twain Annual, where she is on the Editorial Board and formerly served as Volume Reviews Editor.

Episode Bibliography:

Erin Bartram, Steve Courtney, Sarah Kaufold, & Matt Seybold. "Music & Connection in Mark Twain'southward Earth & in Ours" Mark Twain Business firm & Museum (January 26, 2021)

Samuel L. Clemens to Tom Hood. [they reproduce the true tune of the plantations] (March ten, 1873)

Samuel L. Clemens to Olivia L. Langdon, [Tunes are good remembrancers.] (December 19 & xx, 1868)

Kerry Driscoll, "Mark Twain'southward Music Box: Livy, Cosmopolitanism, & The Article Aesthetic" Cosmopolitan Twain Edited by Ann Ryan & Joseph McCullough (U Missouri P, 2008)

Eric Lott, Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Harvard Upwards, 2017)

Matt Seybold, "Death at Christmastime: Marking Twain & The Music of Merciful Release" (December 23, 2020)

Marking Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson & Those Extraordinary Twins (1894)