When I was a child learning to play the piano, Pagan music lessons were not exactly an option.
I grew up in a Christian Baptist environment. Music was always a major part of my life, and by the age of fourteen I had become the organist for my church—a position I held until I was eighteen. I studied piano classically for ten years, continued my musical education through college at Berklee College of Music, studied voice for six years at the university level, and eventually built my professional life around music.
But through all of that training, I never once thought to ask:
Where are the Pagan music lessons?
To be fair, I am not sure I would have found any.
Where Were the Pagan Music Lessons?
There is nothing inherently Christian, Pagan, or otherwise about learning how a quarter note works. A major scale is still a major scale. Breath support is breath support. Intervals, chords, rhythm, ear training, arranging, songwriting, vocal technique, piano technique, recording, and music theory do not change according to your religion.
But the way we experience and apply that knowledge absolutely can.
When I was young, the musical world around me naturally reflected the environment in which I was living. There were church hymns, Christian music, traditional classical repertoire, and the usual examples used in formal music education.
Later in life, when I entered the Pagan world, I discovered an entirely different musical landscape: chants around bonfires, songs for Gods and Goddesses, drumming in ritual, invocations set to music, seasonal songs, healing chants, meditation music, and music created specifically as spellwork.
And yet there was still a disconnect. We had Pagan music. But where was the Pagan music education?
A Lifetime of Music to Pass On
I eventually spent more than thirty-six years teaching music professionally.
Over those years I worked individually with students studying piano, voice, music theory, songwriting, lyric writing, ear training, composition, arranging, and other musical skills. Students came to me because they wanted more than a few tips. They wanted to actually understand what they were doing.
At the professional level, people paid me as much as $100 an hour for that individual instruction. As I began moving away from teaching private lessons one person at a time, I started thinking seriously about what would happen to everything I had learned. Not only the things I learned from books and classrooms, but the little things that accumulate after decades of teaching.
The explanations that finally make something click. The exercises that work. The mistakes almost every beginner makes. The order in which concepts need to be taught so that the next thing actually makes sense. The things I learned from studying piano, voice, songwriting, lyric writing, arranging, music theory, ear training, synthesis, home recording, and production. And most importantly, the things my students taught me about how people actually learn music.
I realized that I wanted to gather all of that knowledge together and pass it on. But I wanted to do it for our community.
The Mysteries Are in the Doing
There is a saying we use in the Craft that has deeply influenced the way I am designing these courses:
The mysteries are in the doing, not in the knowing.
You can read about casting a circle and memorize the words of an invocation. You can study correspondences, ritual structure, the Elements, the tools, the Gods, the symbolism, and the history. But eventually you have to stand inside that circle and do it.
Something happens through experience that cannot be transferred entirely through words on a page.
Music works the same way. You can memorize that a particular note sits on a particular line of the staff. Wonderful. Now recognize it when it appears unexpectedly. Recognize twenty of them. Recognize them faster. Play them. Hear them. Use them. Make music with them. That is when knowledge begins to become musicianship.
And that distinction has shaped almost everything I am building.
More Than a Collection of Videos
There is an extraordinary amount of free music information available online today. That is both wonderful and problematic.
You can search YouTube for almost anything and find someone willing to explain it. You can download cheat sheets, watch tutorials, read articles, and collect hundreds of little pieces of information.
But a pile of information is not necessarily an education. One video assumes you already understand something that another video never taught you. Terminology changes from teacher to teacher. Important foundational skills get skipped because they are not exciting enough to attract clicks.
And perhaps the biggest problem is this: beginners often do not know what they do not know.
They cannot search for the missing piece because they do not yet know that the piece exists. That can leave someone wandering through a forest of information, surrounded by fragments of knowledge but unsure which path actually leads forward.
That is what Alexian’s Learning Grove is: a clear path through that forest.
I have spent decades learning the terrain—what needs to come first, what builds on what, where students usually get lost, and how to guide them from one skill into the next.
The path is there. And I know there will be those who are willing to walk it.
Not because every Pagan musician needs a formal conservatory education, but because anyone who wants a serious music education should have access to one. Including Pagans. And especially, I think, the younger generations coming after us.
Building the Learning Grove
That is why I have been building the music education side of Alexian’s Learning Grove. The actual educational information is real music education. I am not changing music theory to make it “witchier.” Middle C is still Middle C. What changes is the world surrounding the lesson.
Instead of assuming that sacred music means church music, we can talk about chants, ritual music, meditation, Pagan songwriting, drumming, invocation, and the musical traditions developing within our own community. The imagery can belong to us. The language can belong to us. The examples can speak to us.
A Pagan student should not have to translate someone else’s spiritual or cultural framework just to receive serious musical training.
One of the first courses launching this month is called So Note It Be, which teaches music reading. But I do not want students simply memorizing where notes live on a staff.
The courses include written lessons and video instruction, along with downloadable worksheets that allow students to practice what they are learning on paper.
Then there are interactive games. Every module contains a new game. Students can practice skills repeatedly, receive scores, improve their times, and even appear on leaderboards. The idea is to turn repetition—the part everyone knows they need but often avoids—into something that encourages them to try again. And again. Until the answer no longer lives only in the head. It gets into the fingers, the eyes, the ears, and eventually into the body.
The mysteries are in the doing.
And I do not want these courses to become another situation where someone buys a collection of videos, watches three of them, becomes confused, and disappears. Each course is also connected to its own private community.
I will be there. Live!
Students will be able to interact with one another, ask questions, share what they are working on, and meet with me regularly as a group for live feedback and help. Technology allows me to take something I spent decades doing one student at a time and expand it without completely removing the teacher from the education.
That part matters. Because sometimes the answer to a student’s problem is not another forty-minute video.
Sometimes it is: “Move your hand like this.” “Try singing that again.” “That’s the note you’re missing.” “Here’s why you’re confused.”
Or even: “You’re actually doing it correctly. Keep going.”
Passing It On
At this stage of my life, I find myself thinking more and more about what we pass forward.
I have spent most of my life collecting musical knowledge, practicing it, using it, teaching it, writing music with it, recording with it, and figuring out how to explain it to other people.
I do not want that knowledge to stop with me. I want the Pagan child sitting at a keyboard today to have possibilities I never knew existed when I was sitting at mine. I want the adult who always wished they could understand music to discover that it is not too late. I want the Witch writing a chant to understand why one melody feels natural to sing while another feels awkward. I want the person singing around the fire to discover what their voice can actually do. I want Pagan musicians to have access not only to Pagan songs, but to the skills that will allow them to create the Pagan music that has not been written yet.
That is what excites me most. I am not merely building courses about notes, rhythms, scales, chords, singing, songwriting, or recording. I am trying to plant something. A Grove, appropriately enough.
And I hope that long after the first students begin walking through it, they will take what they learn there and create music I could never have imagined. Because eventually, the teacher has to hand the music to the student.
And then we get to hear what happens next.
Blessed Be,
Alexian
For more information about my music, community, and the growing Alexian’s Learning Grove, visit AlexianMusic.com.
For more information about Alexian, including his collected articles here on Pagan Song, his bio, and links to Alexian’s sites on the web, check out Alexian’s artist page here on Pagan Song.
For more on developing skills for Pagan Sacred Music writing and performance, check out these posts.
Visit our homepage to see the full list of the musicians who write for the Pagan Song blog.
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