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I awoke in the middle of the night with the idea for this special edition of BJME. As this year marks 35 years since the original spiral of musical development was published by Swanwick and Tillman (1986), it seemed to me an exciting thought to mark the moment with an issue which recognised this landmark paper. The excitement continued when the editors of BJME accepted my proposal as a worthwhile endeavour, and it has been an exciting and challenging project ever since. I was especially delighted at the opportunity to work with June Boyce-Tillman to develop an article based on an interview with her exploring thoughts behind her contribution to the spiral, which was the culmination of her original doctoral thesis; and at the positive response from Keith Swanwick who agreed to contribute an article to this edition with equal enthusiasm and whose new paper brings to light dimensions of the spiral’s development which are not widely known.
Significant junctions exist at key moments in music education history. All too easily, a page can be turned and knowledge and the opportunity for discussion and debate lost, sometimes forever. I am therefore delighted to be able to present the articles in this issue with the hope that the writings here will help, in some measure, to assuage such moments. I believe this project is significant and important and that it brings new knowledge and perspectives to the field that will enrich musical learning and its discussion for future generations, both in the lives of young people, teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policymakers.
This special edition of BJME aims to do more than mark a research milestone, however. The Swanwick/Tillman spiral is important, because this work has influenced countless music educators in their thinking about developmental music matters. Spirals of development continue to be a formulation that feature prominently in the thinking of music teachers (Anderson, 2019). This has arguably become even more dominant as teachers have thought about curriculum design in order to engage with Ofsted’s (the schools’ inspectorate in England) definition of curriculum. Ofsted consider curriculum as intent, implementation and impact (Phillips, 2017), and it is often as curriculum intent that teachers have encountered spiral formulations of curricula. It is also significant that despite the...