Music degrees are usually designed to train musicians that can perform, compose, transpose and teach.
Playing every scale is a fundamental step in learning to transpose, that is to play music in more than the key you learned it in. It's a necessary step for when a guitar player has learned some piece in say, C major and then they need to perform that piece with a singer that can't physically sing in that key.
Luckily for the vast majority of guitarists who don’t know much of any theory there are these magical devices called a capo!
And digital keyboards have a transpose by semi-tone feature!
It is entirely possible to learn to teach, play, and create new music in many styles without any knowledge of music theory.
It’s really hard to get very good at live ensemble music performance without learning some theory as a byproduct of the necessity of communicating with other musicians.
It’s really hard to get good at playing singing and playing songs on instruments like the piano or guitar without learning the names of some chords because reading at least chord and lyric sheets will accelerate your learning process.
I definitely know guitarists who know basically zero theory but who could hear a song a couple of times and then accompany a singer in any key based on playing by ear and interpreted and performed in a way that the original songwriter couldn’t have been imagined.
The entirety of the Nashville music industry is based around a notation system called the Nashville notation. 1s, 5s, diamonds, bars. The keys are left out and depend on which singer is recording with the band. Five note scales, bends, and capos and you’re talking about half of the popular recorded music in the USA in the 20th century, from rock to blues and country and everything in between.
Playing with a capo sounds different to playing without one, and digital keyboards don't sound the same as acoustic instruments.
Sure you might make a career as a musician playing everything by ear, and there is nothing wrong with that. But a university trained viola player can join an orchestra, be handed violin sheet music and then perform having never heard or practiced the music before.
You don't really need to go do a degree in music at all if your only goal is performance and you have intuitive aptitude, but if your plan is to teach, you're going to be a pretty awful teacher if you only can teach students to ape your specific methodology rather than being able to introduce them to the lingua franca that most musicians are using.
I could be handed piano sheet music and play it straight away in elementary school. It is not that hard to read sheet music and it does not require scales which I never bothered to learn. I was not some kind of prodigy either. It is just that if you play enough, music sheet becomes like normal reading - you just know what is written there. The rest is manual dexterity.
Ability to play from the sheet without preparation if completely orthogonal to anything in this thread. Especially to ability to play all the scales in all variations to the perfection for the practice test.
Musicians need to know the sharps and flats in different keys in order to transpose, and musicians need to be able to play something they have rehearsed accurately, and musicians need to be able to play all across a large range.
Testing scales tests all of these things, and more simultaneously. I fail to see the problem. If you're as good at sight-reading as you say, you can just read the scales off the sheet music and play them all perfectly the first time, so what's the problem?
IMO knowing about sharps and flats is an impediment to transposition. I play alto recorder, and I was very careful to avoid learning any sheet music. Instead I wrote a simple Python script to convert MIDI files to numbers, with 0 representing the lowest note, 1 representing a semitone above it, and so on. I then memorized the fingering for each number. I can transpose in my head just by adding or subtracting. And I practice scales based on the semitone intervals between the degrees of the scale, so I only need to know major/minor/wholetone/pentatonic etc. and just change the starting note.
This is more difficult on the standard piano because of the badly designed keyboard, but you can get isomorphic keyboards that let you play all the keys without learning all the sharps and flats.
> Musicians need to know the sharps and flats in different keys in order to transpose
> Testing scales tests all of these things
I don't see how testing scales tests knowing the sharps and flats really. If you're playing all the (major) scales on a string instrument, it's all about starting on the right note, and then doing the scale pattern: whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. On a guitar, half is one fret and whole is two, and you need to know how to jump to the next string if you don't want to just walk the length of the fretboard. I've never played a wind instrument, but I understand those tend to be tuned to play in certain keys and it can be akward to play in others, and keyboards are setup for c-major, so it takes some practice to get the sense of where the whole and half tones are for other keys, but the example of guitar is not hard. If you can play guitar and have a week to practice it, you should be able to play any major/minor scale on demand.
If you can play the scale, you can probably take the time and think the sharps and flats, but that doesn't really mean you know them, IMHO.
> I've never played a wind instrument, but I understand those tend to be tuned to play in certain keys and it can be akward to play in others
It’s been a while since I played (stopped after college), but yes. Wind instruments really only play in one key. It is really rare to have sheet music in a different key and because of that transposing is not a skill that you really need to be successful. You still learn scales… I played one of the few instruments where you were expected to be able to transpose (F horn with some older music in Eb). Even then, while it wasn’t hard, it wasn’t a common skill.
Guitar, string, and piano are an entirely different beast. And that flexibility of scales and keys is probably why you don’t see many wind instruments professionally playing outside of orchestras.
You see wind instruments outside of orchestras all the time though. The main reason for the domination of guitar and piano is economic: you can play more notes at once and therefore have played richer sound with fewer players. You can split the gig money across less people. It really has nothing to do with the number of wind players that can transpose.
Like, none of what you wrote here has nothing whatsoever with the actual concrete practice test this particular guitarist complained about. Testing scales does not test any of these, actually. It is just absurd to claim that playing scales at practice test is done in order to test how you play "something you have rehearsed accurately" or "ability to transpose".
> If you're as good at sight-reading as you say, you can just read the scales off the sheet music and play them all perfectly the first time, so what's the problem?
So basically, you do not know anything about the test the guitarist complained about.
The quitarist in question was looking for soloist career, so singer wont be an issue. Plus, it is not exactly as if he ever needed to do that quickly on the fly. He does not need to know when all in all variations for that either. Being able to understand and look up scales in that unique situation is useful, but that does not require being able to "play all scales in all keys with all possible variations of articulation for his practical." I am not saying that school does not have right to put in such task, but I am saying that it 100% makes sense that student does not like it.
And second, it is not like you would pass practical just by knowing which notes and chords are in it. You need to play in tempo, with accents and all that jazz. It does require training even if you know exactly what you are supposed to do. Except that this training is brain dead boring.
I disagree. One can read without knowing how to recite the abc’s (ie alphabetic order), sure. But anybody that is a competent reader will have little problem learning the abc’s if they were forced to recite it for a test.
You claim to be a competent musician who doesn’t know scales. I can imagine half-diminished and other intermediate level stuff being non-essential but at the very least major and minor scale knowledge is needed to read music. Being able to sight read implies playing in all keys, which requires knowing the major/minor scales.
Whether you're playing by ear or by sight, having the current scale baked into muscle memory makes it a lot easier to hit the right next note on the first attempt. Otherwise you'll be frequently off by a semitone, or end up using non-optimal finger positions (which can be hard to unlearn).
Any given melody will modulate between multiple major and minor scales; see Coltrane's "Giant Steps" for an extreme example.
Some of the most revered guitar players, like Steve Vai, Joe Satriani or John Petrucci regularly play scales during their concerts. Of course, they don't keep to one scale while playing -- they're masters of their craft, so they play a different scale every other measure.
Well this is wildly wrong. Scales, arpeggios, etc. are taught not just for the theoretical understanding they help with but because they occur VERY frequently in actual pieces
If you're in music school, and are not already performing at a fairly high level, and not interested in being challenged beyond the bare minimum skill set needed for a given position, you're wasting your time and money. You'll never catch up with the competition.
The arts are probably one area in general where it's mostly impractical to show up at college, decide this thing is really cool, and decide to make a career out of it--over and above the lottery nature of the field generally.
Arguably there are some aspects of this in software as well--deliberately avoiding the CS term--but it's almost certainly going to be really hard for someone with no music background to show up at university and decide this is something they're really interested in.
At a first or second tier school, it would be basically unthinkable. None of the professors would even be willing to give you lessons -- they fill their studios through the audition process. It would be a huge waste of money to pay college tuition for remedial music lessons. Also, a big part of college music study is playing in ensembles that are coached by faculty. You have to be at a level where you can hold your own in an ensemble or you can't even participate. The schools are careful to admit only those students who can hang in the ensembles. Getting into music school is an application process on top of getting into the college.
With that said, you could get lessons from a graduate student who wants to earn some money.
My observation (two kids in music school) is that undergrad music is almost like grad school in other fields, in that you sign up with a specific professor who is your teacher for 4 years, and their job is to turn you into a fully fledged professional. The kids who are coming out of those programs are ready to start an independent professional career, the only obstacle being competition and not competence. My daughter, who is graduating this spring, is in fact playing professionally.
(At a tech school) I signed up early-on for an Intro to Music course I thought would be interesting--and to be clear it was. But as it turned out the person teaching the class was a pretty well-known choral director (John Oliver as I recall) and pretty much everyone else in the class were well-versed in music and were there because of said well-known choral director so not knowing the difference between major and minor keys wasn't really part of the program.
It was fine. It just wasn't really what I signed up for.
