The story sounded apocryphal to me too, or maybe it evolved through re-telling and re-remembering.

Most people are in the dark about what college level music education consists of. If piano was being taught in a classroom, then it wasn't a music performance major program. Also, there are tiers of colleges, and a school with an easy music program for rich kids is not unthinkable.

I have two kids who are both music performance majors in college (yes, we had the conversation about jobs), and I'm a musician myself. I learned the scales in middle school.

A remote possibility is that this is a freak occurrence. I think you can't design a training program that absolutely bars creative cheating, without also degrading the program for the majority of students who don't cheat.

I could just be confused, but I thought I remembered the folks doing performance majors alongside us in Keyboard class to get prepare for the piano proficiency exam. Obviously not the Pianists- but I thought every music major had to pass keyboard proficiency.

Yes, that was my experience too. Everyone needed to pass a basic keyboard skills class the first year (or test out of it) regardless of their focus in performance, composition, teaching, etc.

It's true, but it tends to be a pretty lightweight class. Neither of my kids learned to play the piano in any useful way.

Huh, that’s interesting. My fellow scholars and myself found it rather challenging. Basically all students who were not piano players took 4 semesters (keyboard I II III IV), where IV prepared you for the exam.

All of us could play in a lot of scenarios at the end of it.

But it just so happened the college at the small midwestern town I grew up in had faculty from Eastman, Yale, Stanford, NW… and the music department was unusually rigorous for the level of school it was.

Haha, it's the "we wanted to party and not study and we didn't tell you because you aren't pretty" is hilarious. It definitely makes the story sound fake even if it is true.

People don't describe themselves like that. They rationalize why it's reasonable.

Folks are more likely to say "I didn't want to learn a regimented set of things because it interfered with my ability to compose freely and play fluidly instead of mechanically. Also, art is about collaborating with other artists to make novel things, not just to repeat stuff like a machine"

Maybe these days even "not everyone is privileged enough to be able to obsessively repeat the same exercises over and over again"

No one in the history of man has ever made themselves out to be villainous. This sounds like a Scooby Doo villain when unmasked. "we would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kid"

My daughter's name: Albert Einstein.