The authors of this article met on a Master of Arts (MA) music education course a month before the Swanwick Tillman "Sequence of Musical Development" was published. The course was a portal to an exciting range of literature, with the Swanwick Tillman spiral providing a long-term source of discussion and reflection as our careers have diverged and converged over the intervening years. This paper takes the form of a duoethnographic conversation in which we summarise and reflect on that ongoing synergistic discussion, showing the influence the spiral has had within our particular situations.