The Avid Listener (TAL) is a music history blog hosted by W. W. Norton and co-edited by Andrew Dell'Antonio and Felicia Miyakawa. As its title conveys, the blog aims to reach a general audience of keen and enthusiastic listeners in addition to appealing to musicologists and music instructors, and it aspires to foster discussion among all who peruse its site. Launched in the fall of 2014, TAL features essays on a variety of subjects ranging from film music to music and disability to hip-hop and cultural diplomacy. In its first year the site posted nearly fifty essays, and new posts are anticipated to appear weekly.

In many ways, The Avid Listener presents itself as a companion to W. W. Norton's array of available music texts. A sidebar showcases a handful of recently published books, and a single click takes the reader to Norton's webpage for the selected text. Links to the most recent editions of A History of Western Music and The Enjoyment of Music suggest the potential for integrating areas of TAL’s content into courses on Western art music.Footnote ¹ Similarly, links to John Covach and Andrew Flory's What's That Sound?: An Introduction to Rock and Its History and to Bob Stanley's Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé indicate TAL’s potential usefulness in a course centered on American popular musics.Footnote ² Indeed, the format of each essay lends itself to classroom use. Essays are short in length, typically under 1,500 words each, and thus fitting for use as supplemental readings. Each essay also concludes with a set of questions that might be assigned to students as a writing exercise or as a starting point for class discussion. In addition to these ideas, TAL’s editorial team has provided suggestions for more complex approaches for integrating TAL into the classroom in two downloadable documents. The first is a guide intended for use in undergraduate courses; the second is aimed at high school teachers and pairs suggested activities with specific Common Core English Language Arts curriculum standards.Footnote ³ A foreseeable development is the creation of an online repository of teaching ideas submitted by readers of The Avid Listener. Course-specific suggestions connected to individual essays likely would expand instructors’ use of the site and potentially could serve as a vibrant forum on pedagogy.

To ascertain the full range of analytical essays requires some time and effort on the part of the reader. Content appears on the site in reverse chronological order by posting date, with the most recent post appearing at the top of TAL’s homepage. Readers can browse available content by scrolling down the main page, or they can search for posts related to a specific subject either by using the site's search bar or by selecting one of several listed categories such as “Music and Media” or “Music and Politics.” TAL’s editors published a digest of current and upcoming essays in August/September 2015 to better inform the site's visitors of the breadth of its offerings.Footnote ⁴ However, because the announcement of and link to the digest appeared in an individual post that continues to move lower in chronological placement as newer posts are published, casual and first-time readers are unlikely to be aware of the digest's existence. Likewise, links to the two teaching guidelines mentioned above were published in the same post and thus are similarly buried within the site's growing content. Given the value of the digest and teaching guidelines, clear placement of these documents on TAL’s main page would greatly enhance the prospect of readers making full use of these resources. A reorganization of the primary tabs located on the site's homepage to include the various categories—Music and Culture, Popular Music, Western Art Music, Music and Media, Performance Practice, Music and Politics, World Music, and Interviews—with a drop-down feature providing a list of relevant essays, would improve site navigation.

Beyond offering new content, a central aim of The Avid Listener is to present music criticism in engaging and accessible prose. As stated in one of the teaching guidelines, feature essays “can serve two primary functions in the classroom: as informational texts about music history and music in culture, and as exemplars of good writing for general audiences.”Footnote ⁵ Certainly, TAL’s feature essays are written in lucid prose, and co-editors Dell'Antonio and Miyakawa have both contributed as authors and invited established and emerging scholars to share their work on this site. Thus the editors’ suggestion that essays might be assigned to students, not only for the critical perspectives they impart but also for their prose, is both noteworthy and appropriate. In addition to examining syntax and narrative flow, students might be guided to question where and why authors include citations of published scholarship versus embedded links to background and comparative readings. Furthermore, as genres of writing continue to expand and evolve beyond traditional essays and research papers, instructors may wish to adopt the blog format in their own classes, asking students to model the writing they have encountered in their reading of The Avid Listener. A site for public musicology, The Avid Listener is a welcome addition to traditional print media. By providing scholars with an opportunity to write for a general audience and to consider the ways in which non-specialists think and talk about music, TAL presents its readers with music criticism that, as the site states, is “literate and fun to read.”