Why WiderListen.ing?

For most of my time as a music teacher, I kept a spreadsheet of YouTube links or a Spotify playlist folder that, for whatever reason, was never alphabetised when I opened it.

Every set work, every concept, every exam board changed the folder. Modulation for this specification, syncopation for that one, a scalic run I'd found three years ago and could never find again. Every wider listening resource I bought told me what to listen for and then left me to go and find the actual recording myself, because the MP3 was never included. Copyright, apparently. So off I went, scrubbing through a nine-minute video looking for the four bars that mattered, writing the timecode on a Post-it, losing the Post-it.

Music teachers do this every week. There was even a name for it - #WiderListeningWednesday, a weekly ritual of teachers posting listening examples to each other because nothing did it for them automatically. That's a community solving a problem by hand, at scale, forever, because the alternative didn't exist.

What actually got to me wasn't the searching. It was watching colleagues in other subjects pull a shared resource off a drive in seconds while I was still scrubbing through a video, and knowing that somewhere, another music teacher had already found this exact example, cued to this exact moment, and I'd never see it. All that work, done twice. Done a hundred times. Never shared, because there was nowhere to put it.

That's what WiderListen.ing is. A searchable bank of musical concepts - melody, harmony, dynamics, and all the sub-concepts underneath them, modulation, sequence, scalic runs - each one linked to a real recording, an exact timecode, and a note on what you're actually listening for. Not "here's a good piece for texture." Here's the bar, here's the second, here's the ear pointed at the right thing.

Here's what that actually looks like. You've used the same two examples of syncopation for this class as you used on the last two year groups - good examples, they've always landed. Not this time. Two students still don't get it, and ask if you've got anything else. You do. Somewhere. But right now, in front of a class, every song you have ever known has left your brain at once. You search "syncopation" instead of your memory, and up comes a shortlist: track, artist, the exact second it happens, what to listen for when it does. You've got a third example on the board before the moment gets awkward.

That's the whole thing. Not a bigger pile of resources - a shortcut to the right one, already cued.

If you've never used it, this is the week to try it. Search a concept you're teaching this term and see what comes up.

Track of the Week

Buona Sera by Louis Prima — featuring Tenor, Scat, Presto, Saxophone

Listen on YouTube

New in the database this week

• Since You've Been Gone by Rainbow — featuring Solo, Bend, Doubling, Modulation, Conjunct
• Shackles (Praise You) by Mary Mary — featuring Autotune, Drum machine, Close harmony, Glissando/slide, Alto, Repetition
• Buona Sera by Louis Prima — featuring Tenor, Scat, Presto, Saxophone
• Symphony No. 94 in G major, "Surprise" by Joseph Haydn — featuring Piano (dynamics), Accent, Legato
• Music for a Large Ensemble by Steve Reich — featuring Presto, Ostinato, Phase shifting, Polyphonic
• The Rapids (from Jungle Cruise) by James Newton Howard — featuring Tremolo, Scalic, Disjunct, Accelerando, Imperfect cadence, Cor Anglais
• Messiah (HWV 56) by G.F. Handel — featuring Sequence, Interrupted cadence, Bass, Word painting, Monophonic, Trumpet
• Eine Kleine Nachtmusik K. 525 by W.A. Mozart — featuring Sequence, Simple Triple (3/4), Major, Forte, Chromatic movement, Arpeggio, Homophonic
• Recipe For Love by Harry Connick, Jr. — featuring Swing rhythms, Tenor, 32 bar song form, Pizzicato, Walking bass, Stab chords

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