And there were only two modes (if the story can be trusted to get all details right).
Triplets have nothing to do with time signature. Just that point reveals lack of experience in this area. Triplets exist in any time signature or lack of one. They are about beat subdivision.
I could explain each of these points in greater detail but I am not compelled to take the time. Playing scales to meter is a common technique.
And if I asked even a professional to sit down right now and whip out, say a melodic minor in five flats, four octaves at a quick consistent pace, many would indeed need a quick try first. They do get tricky indeed.
Though just give me the tonic name, no need to call it five flats.
Edit to add: To be fair I'm about a decade further in my career than someone going to study music for the first time.
This kind of request is very common at many music schools for these kinds of exams.
A frikkin’ guitarist.
For those of you who don’t know, playing a scale in a different key on a guitar literally involves moving your first finger to a different fret and starting from there. There are two or three patterns you need to learn to be able to handle starting on a different string or different finger. But it’s not hard. I told him he should be ashamed of himself and to stop whining.
Playing in all keys on a sax or trumpet or whatever is a totally different kettle of fish. Still necessary to learn. Still ridiculous to be doing a music degree and not be able to just do but definitely much harder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was fine. It just wasn't really what I signed up for.
Any given melody will modulate between multiple major and minor scales; see Coltrane's "Giant Steps" for an extreme example.
See e.g. https://youtu.be/lGnEy9COP88
If you're talking about a touring musician, or a studio musician, they absolutely know their scales.
Anyone who makes more than $20k/year with their guitar knows their scales.
[0] wink
You can, but you won’t . If your name isn’t Edsger Dijkstra that’s a ridiculous proposition. I could study chemistry without touching a test tube, but that’s also a ridiculous proposition.
You can tune a piano, but you can tuna fish.
> A frikkin’ guitarist.
What instruments do you play? I'm going to guess not guitar. Guitar is one of the few instruments that very many people learn by themselves, by ear, and can get extremely good without foundations like scales and reading notation. I am not surprised about a guitarist struggling to "formalize" their guitar-playing as an undergrad, where it can be as hard as learning a new language when you're an adult.
> There are two or three patterns you need to learn to be able to handle starting on a different string or different finger.
This is simply wrong.
Just the 3-note-per-string supershape covering the western modes is a cycle of seven ordered shapes for each string. As soon as you start including 2- or 4-note-per-string sub-patterns to move to the required position on the neck, the number of the overall fingerings and movements to memorize and practice explodes. This of course doesn't take the pesky B-string into account.
If you're a piano player, imagine playing on 6 rows of uncoloured keys of similar size, each row except one is shifted by a fourth, and the key width diminishes going up the scale (to an uncomfortable degree). No chords on a single row allowed. Oh, and you need two fingers on opposite hands to make a single sound.
Where exactly? Could you please show it?
And if you play those patterns then all the modes of the major scale just kind of fall out of that.
Not boasting - it’s just not a complicated thing at all.
I'm not sure it matters for most practical uses what i++ means so long as you know it is required.
Much as with {} being used for scoping.
Though I agree it is jarring how little many in Gen Z know about how anything works.
I've worked with GenX'ers and Millenials (I'm a millenial), and this isn't unique to GenZ at all. A large number of people don't understand, and are just getting by. Anecdotally, I've seen people at very senior engineering positions who just don't understand the basics of what they're doing. Does that mean that it's jarring how many GenX'ers don't understand?
My older relatives pore out the most excruciating details of their personal lives on people's Facebook profiles, not understanding that it's not a private message. These people grew up and we're the ones who warned us "never use your real name online", etc.
Again, can they quickly understand and apply the knowledge once it is explained to them is all that matters.
In reality it's honestly just better in 99% of situations.
increment operators are a language design antipattern anyway, not some fundamental knowledge.
When I studied music part of my grade was based on a singing exam. I couldn’t sing, didn’t want to sing, would never need to professionally sing, and have never sung since. Make no mistake- it was scored on the quality of singing. But I couldn’t avoid it being part of the exam system.
Imagine someone studying for a computer science degree majoring in chip design. They cheat in Programming 101 by studying only one Sorting Algorithm, not 24 of them, since they can influence which algorithm they are assigned at exam time. Perhaps there is a better example but you get the drift.
When I went to school we had a lot of kids who were only temporarily in the country. Their parents were diplomats or corporate expats. The government still made the kids learn the local language, with the predictable outcome that these kids had no motivation whatsoever to learn the language.
Now with the debate in America being the way it is, a lot of these kids would actually have had a place to go back to, if they only spoke the language.
Similarly with a lot of things you learn in education, most of them seem to be of no use, but it's only because you don't learn them properly they are of no use.
And I think a bit of cheating is healthy.
The late Mihai Patrascu (brilliant CS researcher for those who don't know), outspoken as he was, said data faking skills were essential to keeping his sanity in some courses. [1]
Cheating just means you're not satisfying some random persons bureaucratic needs of assigning a number to your performance. But such a one-dimensional measure cannot really capture anyone's potential.
For some reason few people ponder why people cheat and if the reasons perhaps are valid. Go to that party, if it helps you develop yourself!
The comparison is wrong BTW because cheating at an exam doesn't hurt anyone - but SBFs actions did.
Well, you can be nice and stay home the whole day and do what other people tell to score nicely on some metrics called "grades", or you can ...
In addition to this, for those students who will not cheat, they are then required to spend their effort developing a skill which they may never use again, at the expense of developing skills they will use again. And also at the expense of their placement in the class. Patrascu may have been a brilliant researcher, but was he as brilliant as the person who didn't make the cut because he made the cut instead?
I think cheating is unhealthy for the system.
If a person gets in the habit of cheating because they don't think the thing they are cheating on is important, then they have to develop the skill of always knowing what is important, and what isn't, or they risk cheating on something with serious consequences. Patrascu died at the age of 29 from brain cancer. I wonder if he ignored any symptoms because he didn't think they were consequential.
If you look long enough only you will come across stories of how his disease went: there weren't any symptoms.
Such diseases are dangerous things and shouldn't be joked about lightly, for many cancers the medical literature is clear you won't know until it's too late.
But I think they only apply in contexts where your grading is done on a relative scale (which I think is much worde than an absolute one, where one's better grade doesn't imply another person's lower grade).
> Patrascu may have been a brilliant researcher, but was he as brilliant as the person who didn't make the cut because he made the cut instead?
I would love it if he were among us to give on of his characteristically snarky answers :D [1]
He would probably have said something along the lines of "not as brilliant, more brilliant; which the fact that the other poor chap who wasn't capable of cheating clearly shows".
[1] https://infoweekly.blogspot.com/2010/11/complexity-theory.ht...
There are some problems with complaining you’ll never use a certain skill teachers are trying to teach. Specifically, you don’t know in advance that you will never need it professionally. More generally and more importantly, the whole point of a university education is to give the student a broad base foundation in the subject, to teach you more than a small set of specific interests, and more than is required for a specific job. It is intentionally designed not to be strictly vocational training, it is not an apprenticeship.
I made this mistake when I was young, and complained in a math class, joking loudly and publicly, that the teacher was wasting our collective time forcing us to learn esoteric things we’d never use. I don’t remember what it was exactly, I think maybe matrix determinants, and the joke’s on me because I use determinants and everything else the teacher was teaching in my job professionally.
BTW, I work in chip design and all the hardware people know and use sorting algorithms, and not just the kind you learn in CS 101, they are experts in parallel sorting algorithms. Put the death of Moore’s law on top and the fact that algorithms and efficiency and power consumption are becoming more important every day. These foundations that students assume aren’t relevant to the future actually are important to their future prospects, they just don’t know it yet.
The chip design analogy was clumsy but the point was similar - not every student has the motivation to learn enough about the broad base and it’s value for ultimately improving your specialism.
E.g. multiple octaves, arpeggio inversions, scales in 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, etc.
Plus there's often a requirement to play at a certain tempo, legato/staccato, with correct intonation (for certain instruments), and also to use the correct fingerings as taught in other cases.
So can be a lot more involved than playing a simple scale.
Improv and harmonisation benefit from you knowing all the keys on the keyboard inside out. Likewise, if you start going for volume of music you can play, at some point not having those foundations start to limit you.
Anyone can memorise 3 pieces perfectly and over-practice them then ace a test. But what if the spirit of a grade and level represented more than that? My final teacher (who I met long after finishing exams) was very traditional and had a policy that was vaguely "you shouldn't take more than 3-6 months" to prepare for your grade exam. If you can't reach distinction level within that time, you're not ready so you should work more on your actual playing ability and musicianship.
If you're learning like that, scales will be the least of your worries as we worked on so much repertoire that the need for it was self-evident (and well baked into a good routine).
I guess it's a bit like driving - if you memorize a few routes you can probably perform like a real driver, but that's not really the same as being a real driver.
I did some classical study and grades years ago and remember there being a big disconnect - my teacher just gave me scales and pieces as totally separate entities, and just taught them as things necessary to pass the exam, with no real application or purpose explained to me.
Honestly that sounds like a lot but all the articulation stuff is the same for every scale and once you get the hang of intervals they are really not hard.
Classical musicians do the above for major, harmonic and melodic minor. Jazzers will typically add the major and melodic minor modes, the whole tone scales (only 2 of those) and the diminished scales. People like me add the harmonic major and harmonic minor modes, the augmented scale and a few other bits and pieces.
Granted, not everyone goes into a music program knowing every instrument, but scales and arpeggios ain't terribly hard to practice, be it on a keyboard or a woodwind or a brass or whatever.
My freshman year some students got expelled for keylogging TA passwords and using them to mark assignments passed.
The assignments weren’t that hard…
One of the takeaways here should be for the exam setters. If cheating was widespread (it sounds like a one off here) then they should consider whether the exam itself was an appropriate task, or whether there was an alternative task that may have been more engaging and ultimately a better test for all.
Maybe that’s part of the problem. One of those things is way more intriguing than the other, speaking as someone who wrote fake login screens for my high school’s PS/2 lab. Had like thirty passwords in a couple hours, including one teacher, by running it on the workstation closest to the door.
However each level demands faster tempo, evenness in volume, and a smooth “pulse” (like BB gun pellets hitting a wall)
> on the other hand every new piece is an unique snowflake that you star learning from scratch
Not really. You still have memory of previous ones and you do hear how it sounds. The intuition builds up, so to say. You do learn to hear and distinguish what sounds good or bad. I kind of do not see how theoretical knowledge of the scales would help here.
But also I dropped out the first moment I could, so there is that too. But remembering the pieces was not issue at all. Issue was that I did not even liked music I had to play all that much and playing pieces you dont like much again and again to perfection is not exactly motivating.
Of course, it was the way back then. I've been told that it's changed a lot in the recent 10 or 20 years at least where I live. But the point is, even if they didn't teach improvising in the official lessons, the curriculum also didn't prepare us to do anything outside that narrow scope.
> playing pieces you dont like much again and again to perfection is not exactly motivating.
Sounds still better than half-assing a lot of pieces and then deciding that that's not it, let's try another one. It would have been nice to have some repertoire in playable shape for once.
I dunno. It sounds like you got further, kept doing it for long and kept liking it.
I ditched it first time I could and never looked back. I was against my kids playing music instrument unless they would really really insist on it, because I felt like it is unpleasant activity I don't want to burden them with.
Overall, I was pretty indifferent about my music education, it was just something my parents sort of made me do and I had to spend a few hours every week on, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about.
Source: I’ve done several of these exams.
- new scales I didn't know about
- new ways to play scales I did know
- new instruments which required relearning scales. If you're learning to be a music teacher this is often a big part of it
There are also cases of concert pianists who notoriously refused to practice scales for these kinds of exams.
Somehow people who study medicine are not expected to have medical knowledge. Precursors sure.
Of course I understand that it is a question of supply and demand, for some reason tons of people compete to finish the relatively scarce music university, so the university can demand them to know stuff.