But "thirds" occur every other note in the scale, since intervals are 1-based rather than 0-based. "Every third note" would more closely match the progression of a circle of fourths than a regular triad.
If it's a major scale, you're not supposed to play minor third. Besides "every third note" will eventually be every note because there are 7 notes in a major scale. So, by the second octave major second will be one of the "fizz" notes (similar to ninth chord, stacked 4 thirds, having a major second).
This can be a legit exam BTW, some contemporary Western classical styles use these kind of patterns to make music.
1. It seems unlikely that all the students were conspiring except one. Why leave one student - and exactly one - out? Was s/he incredibly unpopular? Did s/he have minimal contact with the others? I suppose it's possible, but it's also quite strange.
2. It seems unlikely the students didn't understand that if the schedule was random there was a non-zero chance of non-cheating Student 1 doing the admin.
3. It's more likely the schedule was posted ahead of time. Given that, it seems unlikely that anyone would be surprised or flustered when the schedule went as scheduled and the alleged plan failed.
4. It seems very unlikely that the keys would literally be chosen out of a hat. IME of these kinds of exams there's no need for randomness. Students tend to be asked for the less familiar keys because they're less likely to know them well. If someone gets C major and someone else gets Gb major for random reasons it's really not much of a fair test.
5. It seems quite unlikely that a student would be asked to hang around and do admin for an entire day - especially when the admin is essentially trivial anyway.
6. It seems unlikely that anyone who could play the short and long pieces well would be completely put off by being asked to play a scale they hadn't practiced.
7. It seems unlikely that a student would literally say "Oh we didn't practice because we wanted to spend our time partying and dating." That sounds like something someone would say about students, not something students would say about themselves. (This isn't about whether it's true, but whether someone that age would use those words.)
To be clear: this isn't about defending cheating. I just find don't this story very plausible.
Also, the irony that this article about cheating may be somewhat elaborated isn't lost on me.
Additionally, by the time you're an undergraduate you should be able to play any scale and arpeggio smoothly without hesitation. I'm an idiot and played for about 8 years and really, scales and arpeggios are not that difficult. For someone who aspires for a teaching degree these should be cake and you should not be getting flustered by these at all.
Programming equivalent would be something like needing to write a syntactically correct for loop in a random language pulled out of a hat. A basic exercise with some challenge but simple to do if you have put any practice in it.
Yea this was standard warmup for me two years into high school (not piano, but still it's common warmup). I never even went in to music on undergrad.
Everyone I knew who went into music for undergrad could play arpeggio in their sleep in any key, and most of them could do it on the piano too even when that wasn't their instrument.
Maybe what happened is that was a class of all non pianists who were dragging their feet learning piano? Idk
You’d be surprised. Currently taking a minor in music and there are several students taking these classes with me who don’t know how major and minor chords are constructed/are learning for the first time now. I’ve personally noticed it a lot with the classically trained people in my jazz ensemble. Granted I don’t expect them to understand non diatonic harmony/modal stuff right away, but you’d think that they would at least know the basics. Most high school “musicians” are simply doing it for college applications or due to parental pressure. Played in a band in HS and had a few “all state” musicians play with us. They were completely useless. Explaining to them that we were playing a song in a different key/ having them transpose something was a nightmare. Even the jazz band kids could really only play in 2 keys without completely losing form. There’s a lot of posturing in music especially academically from my experience.
> 4. It seems very unlikely that the keys would literally be chosen out of a hat. IME of these kinds of exams there's no need for randomness. Students tend to be asked for the less familiar keys because they're less likely to know them well. If someone gets C major and someone else gets Gb major for random reasons it's really not much of a fair test.
Music teacher – the scale portion of our state's band All-State auditions are one by choice, two by random draw (for a total of 3).
It makes sense in a way. If you preannounce the scales, people will (theoretically) only practice those. If you have the same for everyone and don’t preannounce, the scales will leak during the day and the later students will have extra practice/memorization time.
To point 1, many classes I’ve been in (undergrad and grad) have study groups form at the beginning of the semester where I decide I’m just gonna go though the class solo. In that case, it’s fully conceivable for a subset (or almost all of the student in smaller class) to work together and study in a productive way or conspire together in an unproductive way.
Wait, the number one reason you think is story is apocryphal is you've never been ostracized from a group before?
Wow, have we had different life experiences. I was frequently ostracized exactly like that in my youth. This drove me to spend inordinate amount of time with computers, and lead to a career in the industry, and I'm sure I'm not the only one here who had that experience.
For someone to say "I suppose it's possible" is just so alien, are you sure you didn't write that whole thing just to brag about how you've got friends to the social outcasts? Because that's horrible,
if you did, so I sincerely hope not, because it brought up a lot of painful moments of my youth that I'd forgotten.
> The students didn’t even distribute the keys among themselves in a plausible manner.
Then the answer to the headline is, "Have instructors who do not care about teaching." By the fourth "F major" announced, any musician with a working brain would know something is up.
> Each student chose an easy key to practice, so there were a lot of F majors and E minors, but no B flat minors or B majors.
B major fits the hand better than F major and is significantly more fluid to practice. The only two white keys are for your stubby little thumbs, and the black keys are for the other fingers. For both hands. It's a key that fits like a glove.
F major requires a "bump"-- the b-flat is played by the ring finger on the right hand-- this is a weak, long finger and it feels awkward to have to strike the higher black key with it. Edit: even worse, the stubby little thumbs are on white keys. A student lazy enough to cheat might start out shifting their wrist to accommodate the short thumb. When you try to speed that up you hit a wall and have to relearn the motorhythms of the scale. Relearning wrong physical motion on the piano is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than just learning the correct way. So now the student has less time for dates because they didn't cheat properly to begin with.
To learn to cheat properly you have to actually practice each scale and feel the relative facility. Oh, the irony!
As an advanced amateur pianist, F major and C major are my least favorite scales. F major has the awkward B flat and C major has no good reference by feel for where you are on the keyboard.
Personally, 3 sharps/flats are the easiest scales for me. A lot of people like B and C# because you have 5 and 7 sharps that make it really easy to find the notes (F# is marginally harder...).
You’d be amazed. I remember an undergrad guitarist complaining to me about having to be able to play all scales in all keys with all possible variations of articulation for his practical.
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.
You can study computer science without writing a single line of code. It's no different for music. Learning all the keys by heart is like learning your text editor keybindings, useful, but ultimately has little relevance to actual music theory and composition.
You’ll definitely be hampered in composition if you don’t have decent keyboard fluency and I would say this is table stakes for that. But yes this is more directly relevant to performance. The guitarist in the anecdote above wanted a soloist career so was definitely squarely in the group for which playing scales is a minimum requirement.
Counterpoint[0]: I have a master's degree in composition and I don't play any instruments at a decent level of performance. I would say the requisite skill is knowing how instruments sound, how they sound together, where their limits are, where the golden sounds and techniques can be found, and how to notate all of that so you can reproduce it accurately. If you can read a piece of music and know what it sounds like without needing to hear it played, you'll be fine. And that's also a skill you can learn, just like performance. The rest of composition is experience, artistic vision, and luck, just like every other job.
They have these things called midi guitars now. You don't need keyboard fluency. Hell, now a days you don't need any instrument other than a novation launchpad (a button grid). However, if you are going for a music degree, you should be able to know what the difference between a dorian and mixolydian scale. You should know that there's 7 different ways to play a D major on the guitar. You should know how to do pentatonic scales in any key as well as blues harmonic scales. Any guitarist who wants to play professionally needs to know this. Whether they are a rhythm guitarist, a soloist, a satanist, or a folk strummer. It's not just about being "gud", but knowing how to construct a solo, using those scales, in the songs key. That is very VERY much required. If you are interested in pursuing music as a degree then these things are table stakes. It's taught in high school. Go brush up.
what is a professional? Steve Vai? He knows all his scales. Eddie Van Halen? He's mastered scales at 12. Jimmy Page? ditto. Buddy Guy? He invented one.
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.
Other cherrypicked examples, Dave Grohl and Clapton famously had no formal training and just learned by listening to and emulating artists they liked. I suspect they make over 20k/year.
Dave Grohl knows his scales now. Yes, if you make a band and become successful you can call yourself a professional without music theory. If you go back to what I said though, I said as a degree.
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.
> You can study computer science without writing a single line of code
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.
The problem with scales on a guitar is not getting to the next note, which is relatively easy. It's if you're playing a piece and you haven't worked out the scale to use first and then halfway through you find you need to either get your index finger off the string it's on and onto the string above, or get your pinky waaaaay over there on the same string, and what looks like a simple step is actually really hard - in that scale.
Unless you're using open strings for some effect then most transpositions should be isomorphic on a guitar. And if the open resonances matter a capo has you sorted.
> 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.
Lol. Even though it’s not my first study I can play the guitar and certainly know what’s involved in playing all the major and minor modes. Your explanation grossly exaggerates the complexity.
The cycle of seven shapes. Sounds super fancy but those are all tiny. I literally learned that pattern for the major modes in all positions on the neck in a day and was fluent less than a week later. When you put those small pieces together you make one of the two or three patterns that I mentioned. for example take the three note groups tone tone (cross) tone tone (cross) semitone tone tone (cross) tone semitone if you want to play a two octave major scale starting on the first finger on either of the two lower strings. That pattern is just swapped around if you want to start on the second finger. So you just play tone (cross) semitone tone (cross) to play the first octave to the seventh degree and then either slide up a fret and do the first pattern I mentioned or continue across.
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 remember an undergrad guitarist complaining to me about having to be able to play all scales in all keys with all possible variations of articulation for his practical.
> 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.
I do play guitar and can most certainly play any kind of scale. I was a professional bass player (electric and double bass) and studied to postgrad level. I also play “composer’s piano”. The guitarist in question was an undergrad classical guitarist studying at one of the top London conservatoires. He wasn’t someone who learned by ear.
Transposing a scale to a different key would be straightforward on a guitar (e.g. with a capo), it's just that playing any scale might be difficult independent of the key.
Or without a capo. It's more common to practice scales without one since songs are in guitar-friendly keys like G and C often enough that you want to be able to solo in them without a capo.
I would agree that transposing on a guitar is definitely easier than most other instruments. But it is hardly trivial or easy, assuming you actually have to span the entire fretboard.
I haven't practiced them in twenty years and I can still play them decently. If they start on a black key I need 3 seconds to play an octave in my mind, to double check the first finger of each hand. Twenty years ago I didn't even need that.
The degree they were studying for led to a job where for many of them the ability to play arpeggios in 24 keys may have been irrelevant. For example, teaching the history of music, or perhaps musical therapy.
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.
Of course if you’re not a signer and aren’t interested in singing then the aesthetic quality of singing shouldn’t be scored, and hopefully they were also teaching you a little bit about how to sing, or maybe you just got unlucky (sometimes there are crappy teachers, bad exams, unfair situations, it does happen unfortunately). Singing really is a very useful skill to have when playing instruments or teaching music though. I wasn’t interesting in signing when I was younger, but now I wish I’d spent more time learning how and didn’t have to hide in private to be comfortable singing. It does something very interesting to sing & play at the same time, it’s hard but I think it makes playing the instrument easier.
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.
Yes I understood the point of the singing part of the exams and tried my best (which wasn’t that good). Like you say, a broad base with specialities. I was empathising with how the cheaters must have felt - but I took another direction when faced with the feeling.
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.
I get that people don't want to waste time, but you lose a lot from taking this attitude.
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.
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!
Cheating solves a problem for the cheater, but has the side-effect of entrenching the selection criteria for everyone who comes after. If a genuinely good student, who the professors recognize as good, cannot pass a particular criterion, this motivates the professors to eliminate, or at least discount, the criterion. If the student does pass, then the professors see no harm in continuing to use the criterion for all future students at its current grade weighting.
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?
But I think they only apply in contexts where people realize cheating is going on (Patrascu was an outlier claiming it publicly, but he was an outlier in many things) and also 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".
All grading is done on a relative scale. It's relative to the questions the professors thought to ask, or that the accreditation boards required them to ask.
Too late for the edit window, so I'll reply to add:
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.
You make it sound as if Patrascu was a serial cheater, which wasn't the case.
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.
This seems more along the lines of studying only one basis in which to implement fizzbuzz. You're not really supposed to need to prepare your scales and arpeggios.
I'm just as confused by that. Most people I know who had some goal to earn a degree in music were already able to play any scale on a substantial number of instruments by the time they graduated from high school. Hell, I was in that camp and I didn't even plan on going to college.
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.
A lot of cheating is about time not difficulty. Rather than spend several evenings practising they partied instead, perhaps justifying cheating by deeming the exam topic an irrelevance.
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.
While students getting a music education degree have to learn all the instruments, they typically have a primary instrument that may or not be piano. If piano isn't their primary instrument there's no reason they would know how to play all the scales before starting the degree.
That's still concerning. If your mental model of a scale is via the notes, the piano has helpful colour coding. Not being able to use that implies that the scales have instead been memorised by how they're played - frets, valves, etc. - that will stop working when a more in-depth application of keys is needed.
The piano is not the canonical model of a scale - it’s just a bit more visual than some other instruments. I went to music school and primarily play guitar and violin but can sort of play some keys. I could definitely figure out pretty much any scale on a piano but couldn’t just sit down and immediately play most of them.
I don't know about these exact exams, but often there are a lot of variations to play.
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.
I'll admit that I kind of enjoyed scales on the piano because I could mindlessly practise them when I was forced to practise, but I feel like there's a point where if you don't know them, you're limiting yourself in all kinds of ways.
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.
Same for me, I really enjoy playing scales and the like as studying jazz has made the application and benefit of practice a lot more clear.
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.
Standard is 2 or 3 octaves, arpeggios, 3rds, 4ths etc ascending only (for some reason), groups of 3 or groups of 4 and the different types of articulation (stoccato, legato, accent on every second, third or fourth note etc).
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.
Typically at this level the scales will be performed in more difficult variations, e.g. the right hand plays starting on the third or 6th note of the scale.
There are also cases of concert pianists who notoriously refused to practice scales for these kinds of exams.
Scales can get very very tricky. There are multiple modes of minor, for example, that have different notes ascending and descending. When you combine that with some requirements, like playing the scales the full length of the keyboard up and down at a consistent quick tempo, perhaps in triplets, missing just one note is extremely easy to do. Depending on the requirements of the exam, missing just one note may be enough to hurt your score.
Strange that you would feel a need to debate this.
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.
That’s great to hear, but allow me to offer a common example. Ask a pianist to quickly play four octaves of melodic minor in thirds, and especially as one hand is ascending and the other is descending at the turning point, and there are two different modes being played simultaneously, many will indeed miss a note. Now make it a less common key, and you can see why it can be tricky for some. Certainly not everyone, for students yes and even some experience pianists may need to practice a bit first.
This kind of request is very common at many music schools for these kinds of exams.
I took piano classes for several years as a child and they made me learn all the scales somewhere around the age of 12 or something. It was standard practice and I can't imagine anyone who took classes in the same music education system as I did and couldn't play all the scales.
I played classical piano too, but never learned scales. It seemed completely useless to me and I was still was able to pass. It still seems completely useless to me, to be honest. The # I am supposed to play are right there in the music sheet notation.
I did the same, and found out that it's a great way to paint yourself in a corner. In this corner you can learn very complex pieces by practicing learning them from the sheet music, but on the other hand every new piece is an unique snowflake that you star learning from scratch, and it won't help at all with playing by ear, improvising or even much for playing from lead sheets. Yes, I was able to pass the exams by just knowing how scales work and coming up with fingerings on the fly, but in hindsight it wasn't the best idea.
If we did some improvising, it might be useful. We did no improvising at all, therefore it was just completely useless theory that had literally nothing to do with anything. I think that if they taught us some little improvising, we might see value in scales and maybe I would even ended up liking the piano more.
> 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.
> Sounds still better than half-assing a lot of pieces and then deciding that that's not it, let's try another one.
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.
I don't know if I found them useful, but the program my parents put me in forced me to learn them.
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.
It means more than just that. There are multiple unique modes of minor, and advanced music exams will also bust out enharmonic requirements, playing in thirds and other things that requires very extensive practice.
Usually for each minor key there are three minor modes they can request. That would be 48 different scales as a typical minimum. (not including other requests that are typically made of scale playing in these exams)
In recent years it's very possible they either don't use a language where that syntax is ever required (python) or just use one of the foreach variants in pretty much every language.
I can only think of Python, but are people learning that alone these days? In every other popular language, I can't imagine not ever encountering a situation where you also need to know the index of the iteration.
They could just write loops and remember that repeating the variable name with ++ is part of loop syntax without knowing what it means. Almost like text-generating AI would do it (ducks).
It also matter that they apparently wrote a for loop a number of times without wondering what each of those symbols actually does and just treated it as magic incantation.
Edit: assuming they didn't use a language where such idiom doesn't exist or is not common, as another commented pointed out.
I made it as far as my first internship before I learned what `!val` meant. Don't ding people (especially interns or juniors) for not knowing specifics or notation, or things that can be answered in a single google. What matters is what they do when they learn what `i++` is - does it ever come up again, and do they understand it.
> 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?
Yeah, we see this a lot with younger people because they are just starting in the world. Also, they're the predominate generation right now that's video taping and posting every even possibly interesting moment of their lives, irrespective of whether some 30 year old thinks it's embarrassing. If 60 year olds were posting every strange thought or funny moment we'd have some opinions about them too (Facebook, anyone?) They're just thinking about and misunderstanding a different set of things. But i think the kids are somewhat closer to a humility that might be hard to find elsewhere.
> If 60 year olds were posting every strange thought or funny moment we'd have some opinions about them too (Facebook, anyone?)
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.
To be honest, the world is quite strange. You are supposed to know how to play the piano - and well, before you go to music university.
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.
Just like in a Chinese musical school, something like 98% are supposed to have perfect pitch. Because they have enough applicants to fill the school even with that bar.
The way I'd cheat on this exam would be to just play whatever scale I've practiced and assume the examiner doesn't have perfect pitch.
Having said that, I've never really had trouble with scales in any key on any instrument I've played. I don't know why people training to be professional instructors are even worried about this sort of exam.
Full disclosure: I took piano the first semester of college and got an F. (I don't really know why. I think I made the professor mad or something. I got a B in "intro to Java" despite getting a 100% on every homework, lab, and exam because the instructor told the class that a "d" after a numeric literal tells the compiler that the number is represented in base 10 or "decimal". That is not what that does, and I corrected him. F for participation! Yes, I did go to a terrible school.)
It was at that point that I stopped taking any classes that weren't directly required to graduate; why better yourself and become more well-rounded when internships sort by GPA descending? But I digress ;)
> I've never really had trouble with scales in any key on any instrument I've played.
The fact that you dont have a problem, doesnt mean that others wont have a problem. The article even states that the piano students cant play piano. Just like tons of managers cant manage, or tons of programmers cannot code.
Seriously why do people even make this logical fallacy that "everyone is as smart / decent / talented as me"? I would add thinking too, in certain countries cheating is blantant, in some encouraged.
That's fair. I just assume that people who want to make a career out of music can do everything music. I don't really have a point of reference, but I kind of totally understand the product designer type of person that just wants to make nifty shit in React and has no idea how to code up a bloom filter. Maybe it's the same thing. Scales are just trivia that make a good test question, but has nothing to do with music? If that's the case, then I hate this exam. It's just making talented people suffer for the mathematical types.
I have listened to music before and I think that scales are probably somewhere in between React and bloom filters, though. I got an F in music, though, so don't ask me!
There are basically 3 patterns of finger movement for piano scales with ~2 special cases that don't fit into any of them. I'm guessing that most of them were training to be music teachers on some instrument other than piano, and had to take an Intro to Piano course to get their degree.
Not being musically inclined, beyond liking a bit of the Beatles now and then, I did not expect to get anything out of the music class my wife wanted us to take. Though it had no particular recognized value, the class did award a certificate of completion after finishing the course, which was about a semester-hour spread over most of a year.
The music history we talked about was interesting, especially as I enjoy trivia such as the differences between various apparently similar instruments - did you know the viola is the only instrument to use the alto clef for notation?
The "final exam" had us play a relatively simple (or so they said) piece by Beethoven - Pathétique II. Adagio - and it was making me feel pretty pathetic. My wife had some previous piano history, and was doing quite well; but for me, the notes seemed to always end up in alphabetical order, or arrive long after they should have already left to go home. I began to slightly despair; I'd never hear the end of it if I didn't at least get a (barely) passing grade.
The evening came for the exam, and my wife reported that she'd done quite well. I stepped into the room with apprehension, knowing that the instructor's usual smile would soon turn to disappointment - but wait! The instructor wasn't there?!
He'd been called away to fill in for the Seattle Symphony, and had left instructions on how to take the test - a simple MIDI keyboard connected to an older PC. A slight ray of hope beamed through the window along with the setting sun - could it be? Would the PC be old enough? Sure enough, it was running Windows 98 (not Second Edition, that would have been disastrous)! I could do this!
The Windows 98 MIDI handler had a buffer overflow! All I would have to do is start the exam, hold down the right keys on the keyboard to trigger it, and the program would crash. Since the way it "scored" your playing was to start by writing your name and 100 points to the database, it would record that I had begun, and then there would be no recording of me making any mistakes.
I now have my certificate, and a photo of me with a slightly sheepish grin, as I was the only student to get a perfect score. I think my wife might suspect something, as she was perhaps near enough to hear that what I played sounded more like the Cascades trying to clear the track than anything Beethoven would have written, but I just told her that he was mostly deaf and probably played loud.
Maybe it's graded on a curve, so you just have to beat the median.
Or hope you're luckily a "C" student.
It is a bit ironic that liberal arts students have to have demonstrated competency, while engineering students who will go on to build things your life depends on just have to do better than other students.
it better represents reality, at your job you also don't have some objective measure you're being evaluated against. you just have to do well enough not to get fired
A music theory instructor from my past told us a story about his equivalent practical exam. He had to demonstrate proficiency with multiple string instruments. Instead of learning fingering for each instrument, he claimed he tuned them so they could all be played the same way. I don’t have any training in string instruments, so I’m not sure how feasible this actually is...
It is and it isn't. All of the violin family instruments are tuned in fifths, but the strings have limited tuning range and would either break or produce no sound if you tried to force-fit a single tuning onto all of them, e.g., tuning a violin like a viola or vice versa. The double bass is its own beast, usually tuned in fourths, but in fifths is virtually unplayable without injury by mere mortals. And fifths require careful choice of strings.
You still have to read the clefs.
A remote possibility is that the person was a guitarist or bassist, and tuned the instruments in fourths. I have a friend who studied classical guitar as an undergrad, and music theory in grad school, while earning a living as an electric bassist in R&B bands, then became a theory professor, now retired.
It's bizarre. It's certainly possible to do this but there isn't much point given the different instruments need different fingering tequniques to reach notes anyway, and getting a feel for these fingerings ought to be harder than the transposition.
I assume the following quote was not meant to be precise:
> The students didn’t even distribute the keys among themselves in a plausible manner. Each student chose an easy key to practice, so there were a lot of F majors and E minors, but no B flat minors or B majors.
but B major is pretty much the easiest scale to play on the piano there is!
In terms of fingering if you know it. It's also one of the least common; there's a lot of music in F major, there's less accidentals in the scale and hence music in the key is more easily readable, chords are more easily deduced (less black keys involved), etc.
In college the night before a big computer programming project was due, all of us students met in the computer lab and basically copied one student who had his working. The Professor obviously noticed and told us all to do it again.
I studied classical guitar for a few years, and let me tell you, scales on the guitar do not involve just moving a finger or a barre or a capo: look up the Segovia scales, that’s what I was learning and it’s physically demanding…
I'm not sure I understand how this cheating compact was supposed to work; didn't the conspiring students need to control who was the first student, or the student selected to pull keys from the hat?
Exams and sports competitions are a particularly nasty example of Campbell's Law (or Goodheart's Law) – collapsing the correlation between metric and the true goal.
Exams, for example, are supposed to measure how much students progressed. "True goal" - learn some knowledge or master some skill. "Metric" is the quiz/tests/exam result.
If you try to design an exam for any new skill or knowledge, you'll come up with a pretty good metric. But soon, people will start ignoring the true goal and focus on the metric. Instead of "measuring" how well they learned the skill, your metric measures "how well they overfitted for the exam".
In a way, the mere fact that people need to "prepare for exams" is a testament to how failed the system is.
Sport is similar. The initial idea of the judging system and competitions is to "measure" the performance of the athlete. Rewards and rules are introduced to make this metric clear and unambiguous. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and athletes and coaches don't care about overall performance – they care about winning the medal, so they focus only on the subset of a skill that gives points. This problem is especially horrifying in the sports like figure skating after introducing the IJS system in 2006. Correlation between "true goal" (skating skills) and "metrics" (points given for specific elements) is collapsed – people chase points, not the skill.
It's not a simple problem. There are few neat papers on how to approach solving Goodheart's problems ([1] [2]). But on a practical level, the number one tool seems to be to decrease the importance of the metric.
Some sports, for example, have "one major competition" once in 4 years (Olympic Games). The price of winning it is insane. Who cares about the true goal if it's almost life-and-death importance? You chase the points. But other sports have a more healthy approach – tennis, for example, doesn't care much about the Olympics. They have Slams and different surfaces competitions throughout the year. You lost a game - not the end of the world. There will be many more. The higher prize is to win all four Slams in your career, so the price of the metric at a single competition is not that huge.
And this collapsing metric is a reason why people cheat. You can't cheat on a true goal, only on a proxy metric.
Right, but again, what's the True Goal of jump part of athletics? Unlikely it's "achieve maximum at vertical jumping with these very specific conditions". It's more like "achieve maximum at vertical jumping". Which includes thousands of variantions. It's just we can't measure it without some standards, so specific rules were introduced. In a way, these limitations that rule impose at technique are the byproduct of inability to measure True Goal. We measure what's measurable, and for that some degree of standartization is required.
I'm not sure I'm familiar with racewalking story. Any good links to read?
Not sure what you mean? I think that was still aimed at the students who, presumably if they were to become teachers one day, would expect their own students not to cheat.
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"
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.
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.
Am (especially) and Em happen to be very easy piano keys, too.
What I meant is that playing a C major scale is easy, but it gets weird as you work through different keys. There's no consistency, so transposing is non-trivial. Compare that to a guitar and barre chords and capos.
C major is only easy conceptually, technically other scales are easier, such as B major.
In guitar transposition is easy conceptually, but not so much technically, not being able to rely on open strings as much is a big limiter to novice guitarists. And guitar being such a popular instrument, there's a lot of those.
On average technical limitations will dictate keys more than conceptual limitations.
all white keys is easy to play a scale without thinking, but I find it much harder to play well than keys that have some sharps or flats. that pattern of 2-space-3-space on the black key shelps to anchor your hands. I'd take e-flat major--its far easier to play than c-major.
Transposing is harder, but the vast majority of piano litature is never played tranposed--you play the notes on the sheet music. I've tried some of those new layout keyboards like the Linnstrument, and I'd never try to play a Beethoven sonata on one.
To be fair, perhaps most sonatas include transposition within them, only it's written out.
This actually presents a hurdle for me, because if I learned a theme in G, and now I have to play it in D I feel like I know it, so I don't practice it as much as I did initially and it ends up in this weird limbo where I know what I'm supposed to play, but haven't properly trained my fingers.
But there's plenty of stories of Liszt or Chopin transposing music on the spot. Jazz too.
The author might have missed on some of life, because I don't think "effort to look pretty" necessarily has to do with the looks you were born with, but rather with styling: hair, make-up, clothes.
