I doubt he plays scales on concerts. It is actually requirement that is not directly related to ability to play music.
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.
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/Z01s5siJl6E -- the first two licks are clear examples of walking the scale, in one or both directions respectively -- or https://youtu.be/lGnEy9COP88
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.