5-week online course via Zoom

$150 ($135 for $5 a month and above Patreon members)
Sundays, January 8, 15, 22, 29 & Feb5
5 pm–7 pm EST/New York time (2 pm–4 pm California time, 10 pm – 12 am UK time)

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time.

Sound plays an important role in rites and rituals in many cultures and traditions around the world; the familiar sound of breakfast being prepared in our own home; the distant clanging of goat bells as a farmer takes his herd to feed at dawn, Tibetan Buddhists chanting, striking bells and blowing bone trumpets in their ‘chöd’ ego-severing ceremony; the Qu’ran being chanted chanted in the Mosque and broadcast into a town through loudspeakers; church bells calling communities to mass where hymn books are handed out and songs of prayer are sung as a congregation; traditional songs and melodies being played for birthdays, weddings, funerals and rituals memorialising or marking a significant event such as a change of season; mothers and fathers singing their children the very same lullabies that lulled them to sleep when they were young; listening to the sea, the sound of rain or a crackling fire and taking a deep breath in a moment of stillness, a feeling shared by humans across millennia that makes us part of a bigger story across time and space.

Following Mikey Kirkpatrick’s sold-out Music, Healing and Deep Listening classes in Autumn 2021 and Spring 2022, you are now invited to delve deeper into your musical potential and explore the creative and healing possibilities of a heightened awareness of sound in our daily lives. This five-week ‘Sonic Rites and Rituals’ class is an invitation to retune ourselves with the world around us at a time of dissonance and disconnection, through listening, improvising, composing and performing with music and sound. This class will also explore how we can respond to life changes and challenges with musicality, helping us to find power in unwanted noise by using it as a raw material for musical creativity.

This class will investigate the urgent need for new forms of shamanism, a deeper and more embodied listening and music-making practice by allows our intuition to guide our breath, intentions and actions, resulting in a richer understanding of ourselves and how we might occupy our time in this world with a reflective and responsive ear turned towards the people and places that are important to us, and in particular the earth itself.

You will be offered a set of creative tools for listening and creating with sound, a practice method that drawn from Mikey’s 30 years of experience as a composing and improvising multi-instrumentalist performing on streets and stages around the world, combined with his reiki practice and work as an educator and facilitator with people of all ages and backgrounds. The Winter edition of this class will involve an open invitation to imagine, initiate and perform a sonic rite or ritual during the final class in dialogue with the change of the season and period of winter solstice and new beginnings. Individual research projects into cultural practices and traditions combined with personal interests and experiences will be encouraged. The class will focus on creating music with the voice and sonorous objects or instruments that are available in the home (or that can be built), but instrumental players are welcome to translate the class content onto your instrument if that is more appropriate at this stage of your musical journey. The class is designed as a musical dialogue with you, and so will evolve in response with what you bring to our online space.

You do not have to have attended Mikey’s previous Music, Healing and Deep Listening class in order to sign up, and you don’t have to have musical training or experience in order to attend; a life’s worth of being a listening and communicating body is a musical training in itself. You will be provided with a wide range of additional material to further your own research, and the class will conclude with a candle-lit ceremony and sharing. Previous Music, Healing and Deep Listening class creations are available to stream and download here: https://mhdlcollective.bandcamp.com.

Mikey Kirkpatrick is a flutist, singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer and performer who has released multiple albums and toured internationally under the stage name Bird Radio, as well as collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, poets, theatre practitioners and sound artists. He is also an associate lecturer in music and education at Goldsmiths University in London where he is also the founding director of Alchemy, a collective of artists, teachers and mentors that works with teenagers at risk of exclusion from school, using music creation and performance to build confidence and develop creative skills that can support them in carving out futures for themselves. Mikey has been practicing reiki and music for 30 years (he has performed over 200 ‘reiki-flute’ sessions via live radio during the Covid-19 pandemic) and has more recently become interested in how musicality and listening can be hugely beneficial to all aspects of life. His recent explorations into hypnosis combined with psychoanalysis have also profoundly influenced his relationship with body, memory and creativity.

www.mikeykirkpatrick.com