Anna Gawboy, associate professor and area head of musicology and theory, will present "Esotericism and magic in Sun Ra and Alton Abraham’s creative practice." This lecture is co-sponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries and the School of Music. (Image source: www.lib.uchicago.edu). This talk will be presented in hybrid format. Participants may attend in person in 205 Music and Dance Library, or online (registration required).
In the mid-1950s, the American jazz musician Hermann Blount and his producer Alton Abraham co-founded Thmei Research, a secret society of Black intellectuals whose members were drawn from Chicago’s South Side. Abraham's influence and Thmei's activities informed Blount's public transformation into Sun Ra, an ancient Egyptian sun god reincarnated as a Space Brother from the planet Saturn (Sites 2020, Szwed 1997). Sun Ra's esoteric interests are often acknowledged, but there has been little sustained analysis of its sources and practices. A close reading of the esoteric texts and magical items held in the Alton Abraham Archive of Sun Ra at the University of Chicago suggest a heterogenous yet coherent system influenced by Theosophy, hoodoo, magical grimoires published by L. W. De Laurence and Lewis de Claremont, among other traditions. I argue that Sun Ra and Abraham devised unique Afrocentric solutions to the conceptual and practical problems posed by these sources, and in doing so, they laid the groundwork for Sun Ra's Afrofuturism. In particular, Sun Ra and Abraham drew upon Theosophy's conceptualization of sound as the purest manifestation of divine cosmic energy to fashion a new "ATONAL music from outer space" that could bring physical and psychic healing to a planet corrupted by racism, political complacency, and spiritual ignorance. Sun Ra's esotericism invites us to hear his sonic experimentalism as part of his magical practice designed to effect spiritual and material change.
This lecture is free and open to the public. No ticket required.
Anna Gawboy is Associate Professor of Music Theory at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on musicalized multimedia and the intersection of music, esotericism, and modernism in the long twentieth century.
Lectures in Musicology is co-sponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries.
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