For centuries American musicians have found creative agency and ethical empowerment through animist listening. Spirit invocations, imaginal soundscapes, and cosmic forces pervade the music of the free world—and most of all when that freedom is threatened. Artist and director of the American Museum of Paramusicology, Matt Marble leads this single-lecture class exploring animism as a technology of empathic listening and its indispensable role in the creative process and the American dream.

Drawing from archival research and comparative metaphysics, we will look at how American musicians have found creative agency, ethical orientation, and progressive praxis through animist listening across the centuries. We’ll examine and listen to various animist music cultures, from Native American dream songs and Shaker gift songs to 19th-century séance music, and 20th-century musical luminaries like Merceditas Valdes, Sun Ra, and Pauline Oliveros, noting how these animist musics navigated and challenged colonial forces. Across musical styles and metaphysical traditions, students will leave with a new framework for listening as an ethical and empowering force in American music history—and in creative practice, ritual work, and collective freedom today.

I'm grateful to present this lecture at the Forging an American Musical Identity Conference at CUNY on January 29th as part of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 19th-Century American metaphysician, Andrew Jackson Davis, has long been dismissively footnoted by historians. This talk seeks to contextualize his “Harmonial” teachings in practical imagination while for the first time articulating the influence his sonic theology had on American music culture.  I'll also be articulating how Davis' cosmic teachings, deeply aligned with progressive social justice politics, laid the groundwork for subsequent counter-culture and new age movements and currently speaks to the authoritarian forces challenging our freedom today.  

“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (1776)

Today (01/12/26) at 4pm EST on NTS Radio via Mississippi Records

John Cage, Sun Ra, and David Lynch are only some of the many artists who’ve found inspiration in the spiritual teachings of the Theosophical Society, founded in New York City in 1875. Via the American Museum of Paramusicology, this mix presents a special exploration of artists with ties to this influential metaphysical movement which anticipated the New Age to come.

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