Remember your beloved Father, the one who told you “the world is your oyster” and “you can be any occupation you want to be as long as you are willing to work hard enough to accomplish it!” Start your Father’s Day right by listening to Classical music which has the power to improve your mood, make you smarter, help you work faster with more accuracy, improves health and healing, grows healthier plants in fewer days, increases sales in stores, soothes your mind and prevents crime. No one is immune to the power of music! Parents remember to have classical music on your family’s iPod.
We are dedicating this Father’s Day to honoring men who are authors, scientists, medical doctors, engineers, mathematicians, teachers, and musicians. These eminent individuals have integrated music into their thinking process.
If anyone has an experience they would like to share with our readers on the benefits of classical music please send it and it will be include it in the July 2010 newsletter.
https://www.madelinefrankviola.com/
Madeline’s Musical One Minute Radio Show for June 2010:
How does music play a part of Mark Twain’s life as an author and musician and what instruments did he play?
Click for Your Radio Show
https://www.madelinefrankviola.com/madelines-one-minute-radio-show/
Question of the Month: Who was Mark Twain? Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel Clemens, the American author of “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”. Mark Twain is a nautical term “meaning by the mark of two fathoms. The water was 2 fathoms (12 feet) deep and indicated safe water.” He was a printer, journalist, editor, licensed Mississippi river-boat pilot (1857-61), author, husband, father, grandfather, inventor and musician.
On November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born to John Marshall Clemens, a Tennessee county merchant and Jane Lampton Clemens. Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, was the sixth child out of seven children. He had 4 older brothers an older sister and a younger sister.
At the age of four Twain’s family moved to the port town of Hannibal ,Missouri a slave state on the Mississippi River . Hannibal, Missouri was ” the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
At the age of 11 in March of 1847 Twain’s father dies of pneumonia . “The next year, he became a printer’s apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother Orion.” At the age of 18 he went to work as a printer in New York City, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia. He went to the public library at night to educate himself and “joined the union”
When he was 22, after taking a trip to New Orleans on the Mississippi he was inspired to become a steamboat pilot by Horace E. Bixby, steamboat pilot. The pay for becoming a steamboat pilot was $250 per month, around $72,400 in today’s pay. To become a steamboat pilot you “needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at the hundreds of ports and wood-lots along the river banks. Twain meticulously studied 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot license in 1859.” To be a steamboat pilot you needed to know all 2000 miles of the Mississippi as you were traveling at night in the dark. Electricity had not been invented and candles were not allowed as they caused fires.
Twain and his brother, Orion, headed west for more than two weeks by stage coach “traveling across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City along the way.” The following books were inspired by his travels: “Roughing It” ; “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”. In Virginia City, Nevada, Twain he worked as a miner and later “found work at a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.”
He later traveled to “Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii) as a reporter for the “Sacramento Union”. His travelogues were popular and became the basis for his first lectures.” Twain’s many travels around the United States and Europe were the inspiration for his writing.
Mark Twain “was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla , and the two spent much time together in Tesla’s laboratory. Twain patented three inventions, including an “Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments” (to replace suspenders) and a history trivia game. Most commercially successful was a self-pasting scrapbook; a dried adhesive on the pages only needed to be moistened before use.”
He uses his knowledge of science in his book “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. Twain promotes a contemporary American time travelor ” to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England. This type of storyline would later become a common feature of the science fiction sub-genre, Alternate history.”
In 1907 Oxford University awarded Mark Twain “an honorary doctorate in letters.” Thomas Edison in 1909 “visited Twain at his home in Redding, Connecticut and filmed him. Part of the footage was used in “The Prince and the Pauper” (1909), a two-reel short film.”
In 1909 Twain wrote “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'”
Samuel Clemons, Mark Twain, died on April 21, 1910 as Halley’s Comet was passing by.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
http://gardenofpraise.com/ibdtwain.htm
“Parkinson’s Disease Patients Dance Their Way to Improved Health” (May 11, 2010) by Jordan K. Turgeon from the Medill Reports in Chicago.
On Mondays and Thursdays at Chicago’s Drucker Center Younker and Wang take a dance class for Parkinson’s disease patients. “Their instructor, dance and movement sciences expert Citlali Lopez-Ortiz, volunteers her time, as does the assistant and live pianist, to help Parkinson’s disease patients maintain or improve their mobility and balance. The dance program began in November 2009 at the request of physicians from the Northwestern Faculty Foundation and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.” Lopez-Ortiz said, “There is a whole set of literature that speaks to the importance of rhythmic, auditory and visual stimulation to improve motor coordination or rhythmic motor patterns in Parkinson’s disease.We have the music – that type of auditory stimulation – and we try to design motions that encourage rhythmic patterns and motor control.”
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=164459