Reimagine music with me!

I'm putting out a call to join Reimagine Music, a five-week live course I'll be running here on Grokkist starting July 5th. If you've ever loved music but felt locked out of really understanding it, or if you've been making music for years and want a genuinely new way of thinking about what you're doing, you are invited.

Some background on how this course came to be:

I have a complicated relationship with my PhD. I spent about fifteen years in higher education studying music, straddling theory and composition, and a lot of what's behind that curtain has frankly become ugly to me along the way. A few years ago I started to realize that although I wanted to see the PhD through, I couldn’t stay on the academic path forever and would probably need to forge my own (very Grokkist-y of me, I know).

A lot of what gets taught in music is less about music than it is about power. About who gets to be an authority, who is considered a master. About maintaining the illusion that certain music, and certain ways of talking about music, are neutral and objective and simply better, when really they're political all the way down.

Since around 2022 I've been trying to get this material out into the world in various formats and framings (book drafts, courses, podcasts, Tiktok playlists…) but I’ve struggled to make it all click, or to reach the people I most wanted to reach. But some recent conversations with Danu helped me finally lock the pieces into place, and I really feel like this time it’s ready to be what it’s supposed to be.

I think I have something big to share that really does get gatekept and artificially painted as being way above most people’s heads—when really, at the end of the day, music is ours. Music is human. I think of it as if society has chopped off one of our limbs, and then has gone on trying to convince us we never had that limb in the first place. A big part of what drives me in this project is helping people to reclaim their own relationship with music, to see through the illusion that any of us are locked out of understanding or participating in it.

Reimagine Music is five live sessions exploring music as philosophy, culture, and creative practice. We'll look at how music carries meaning, how the classical canon got built and who it left out, how music moves through your body before you can name what it's doing, and what it might mean to make something yourself. There is an optional creative project (and I’ll be available for one-on-one guidance if you want it), but there are no theory or creative prerequisites. You are qualified to join.

The call

I'm looking for 8–12 people to go through this first iteration with me. I feel genuinely ready to teach this material—but I also know that the first run of anything is where you really find out what you've made, and I want people who are up for that, who are curious about music and open to having their relationship to it shift. And people who are willing to tell me what's landing and what isn't, so I can keep refining how I communicate these ideas.

I come to teaching as a collaborator, not an authority. I don’t pretend to know everything, and the best learning spaces I've ever been in felt like we were figuring something out together. That's the kind of space I aim to build.

Commitment

Five weekly live sessions, July 5 – August 2. $180, with a 30% member discount and a Forget About the Price Tag option if cost is a barrier.

How to get involved

Enroll directly here, or reply to this post if you have questions or just want to say hello first.