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> I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets.

This is pretty much how music is taught to all students learning 'classical' and was my experience as well. Most never really learn anything about music at a fundamental level, and can even have an entire career in the classical world not really knowing anything about what's going on in the music. Random story, but one night here in NYC I got asked by someone to bring out a visiting musician from Spain to hear some music, who had been playing in a major symphony there since the 80s (can't remember if it was Barcelona Symphony or Spanish National Orchestra). Brought him to Smalls in the West Village to catch whoever was playing that night. He was really impressed, kept on leaning over asking "how is that piano player doing that with no sheet music???". It's just not part of a regular classical musician's training, unless they're working to be a composer as well.

But back to your point, I felt the same way with music in my schools growing up. No one ever taught you how to actually play music, they just gave you sheet music and said "play this". It wasn't until much later that I started working with a jazz teacher privately that I got introduced to all the chords, scales/modes, and theories that'd you need to improvise or play music with others. Honestly, I probably would have been better off in high school if someone had told me to drop music classes altogether, handed me a bass or guitar or synth, and said go have fun with a few friends in a garage.

As far as I am concerned, classical music in conservatoire includes music theory and instrument trainings. To play in an orchestra, especially semi famous one, most likely you would need to follow an university/similar degree.

Any exam is done without a music sheet, music theory always include composition. Chord progressions comes surely later in music theory but harmony is key from classic repertoire,and counterpoint from baroque era repertoire.

Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying that a professional musician at a major symphony doesn't know about theory -- this guy I took out was clearly very accomplished in his field and went to conservatory for it. Even the classical education I had up through high school included harmony and chords. But there is a difference between knowing the theory from a technical perspective to be tested on, and completely embodying it and using it to make music. Here's a recent video of my friend's group playing [1] -- everyone involved has a world-class level of understanding of theory, but uses it to improvise, not just to read sheets.

And let's not forget that a lot of 'classical' musicians back in the day were expected to be able to improvise as well. There's just a different priority for a 'classical' performer these days and a 'jazz' performer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_BE_gi4YkA

> I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets.

Without commenting on the dire state of music (and arts) education in the schools, the same is true of all subjects. Mathematics is mostly taught as syntactic manipulation; physics as memorizing a bunch of "laws" and doing "experiments" that have a right or wrong answer (chemistry and biology are even worse in this regard) and so on. Even literature and history are not taught as an exploration and inquiry of possible themes but as structured topics (often one per book) that you learn as being "right" or "wrong".

The emphasis on testing, and in particular standardized testing, has made this worse, since teachers who don't "teach to the test" are often penalized.

Mathematics and science do have right and wrong answers. That's why physics, chemistry, etc. are "science" and not "religion" or "ideology".

> teach to the test

How are you going to teach to the test when the test has questions like: "what is the sum of 647 and 296?"

> standardized testing

There's nothing cultural about math and science. Standardized testing is the only way to objectively measure progress and mastery of them.

> Mathematics and science do have right and wrong answers. That's why physics, chemistry, etc. are "science" and not "religion" or "ideology".

That's an excessively reductio view of the practice of science, and frankly dangerous. I think you know better than that. I mean, is newtonian mechanics "right" or "wrong"? It can't always give you the right answer, yet we do teach it and we should.

Most science is working on the edge of what is known. The idea that there are "right" and "wrong" answers in practical science is what has supported peoples' belief that "hey, I heard of someone getting the vaccine and yet they got sick anyway -- what a scam!" or "Scientists said not to bother with a mask but to wash hands furiously, and now they want us to wear masks -- they don't know anything".

The reason I put "experiment" in quotation marks is a lot of "experimentation" in high school is at the level of "pour the solution from the bottle into a beaker, put a strip of litmus paper in, and record the pH." Everybody uses the same bottle of solution so there's one correct answer. That is not "experimentation" that is simply practicing a lab procedure.

"Experimentation" is open ended, and involves debugging. "Make a solution that has a pH of 7.2. How did you determine that? What attempts did you make and what went wrong." Or "reproduce the Millikan oil-drop experiment. What's the charge of the electron? How did it compare to Millikan's result and why?"

The "science is about facts" attitude is a pernicious meme in the public consciousness. It's just as bad as the deterministic teaching of history.

> It can't always give you the right answer, yet we do teach it and we should.

Newtonian mechanics gives unique and right answers within the domain where it applies. It doesn't apply to relativistic or quantum mechanics, but that is not relevant to high school physics.

Saying Newtonian Mechanics doesn't give correct answers is way overly pedantic.

There's not remotely enough time in high school science classes to derive much of newtonian mechanics from experiments, let alone quantum mechanics from oil drop experiments and long term experiments like testing vaccines. Heck, high school science struggles to simply teach the heliocentric model of the solar system. Most of the students don't understand what an ellipse is, and they hardly have the time to make observations over a year period to then guess at what laws govern their motions.

Most of us have an intuitive notion of NM already. I remember having the notion that if I threw a rock, it accelerated for a time after leaving my hand, before decelerating. I was disabused of that in physics class.

> Most of us have an intuitive notion of NM already. I remember having the notion that if I threw a rock, it accelerated for a time after leaving my hand, before decelerating. I was disabused of that in physics class.

And it took a long time for people to figure that out (or how you see, or tons of other "intuitive" concepts). IMHO, if you had to chose only door one or door two, it would be better for students to leave school with an understanding of what the scientific process is (not even baconian scientific method) rather than the idea that science has some sort of weird epistemology of "facts" and "non-facts". The worst and loudest Gradgrinds of STEM education policy clearly have no idea of this.

The people who just learn facts with no understanding don't do well on tests, either. That's kinda the point of the tests. I've seen this in action plenty.

The idea that tests can't test "real" knowledge is simply wrong.

P.S. at Caltech, the science & engineering examinations were all open-book open-note. No need to memorize anything. But you were doomed if you didn't understand the material.

Even for a multiple guess test, the wrong answers are ones one would arrive at if one suffered from the usual misconceptions about how the problem should be solved. The wrong guesses are not random. The people who compose the tests aren't fools.

The problem is time. Getting 140+ people to learn their instruments is hard enough, mixing in Music theory is just gonna add to the frustration, for which most of the band will never need to know.

That even holds true for everything but the smallest of jazz combos. Could you imagine listening to a group of 20 musicians all playing from Fake Books? It would be a mess of noise.

> for which most of the band will never need to know.

What do you mean by "need"? I think, for the purpose of playing music, music theory is more useful than reading. But no one really needs to do music in the first place. It's recreation and fun and expression.

20 musicians can work together. They'd need to know how to listen and make space.

https://youtu.be/_5drnz5B-c4?t=61

Music education got cut entirely in the East Bay public school district my kids attended. Had to move out of state.

Couldn't agree more. I think the issue is that school budgets are limited and music programs are perennially on the chopping block because they are among the most expensive and are seen as the least critical to education. The band directors fall into a cycle of needing to justify the investment by getting the kids to play the most impressive piece that they are capable of playing, even if the kids learn absolutely nothing along the way.

And have you ever tried to get 50 kids to do the same thing for five minutes? Even if that thing is sitting still, it's virtually impossible. If it's playing a song at the limit of their musical ability? You'd have a better time swallowing a shovel.

For what it's worth, contra to the other agreeing comments, this didn't happen to me. I'm sure this is all locally contingent upon an instructor with the ability and interest, but we had a jazz band I was a part of in middle school (in LA County early 90s) and we very much learned to compose and play music that was not written down on a sheet. I don't know that that kind of thing was feasible for the larger concert band, which had like 140 kids or something and one teacher.

I also played brass, for what it's worth, but never felt limited by breath endurance. I was a ~5:00 mile runner as a 12 year-old, though.

This reads to me like wanting to learn sports, and then disliking that your soccer instructor didn't teach you how to throw a ball. There's a lot you can learn about music in the classical framework, but the focus there is certainly not improvisation based on chord sheets. Generally learning about improvisation in a high school context would happen in jazz band, although in my experience lots of people in jazz band (including myself) are not too interested in improvisation either. A separate music theory class might also help although dedicated classes for that are probably even less common than having a jazz band, although if a student is particularly motivated and interested and the school is at all flexible, you can sometimes work out a deal with the band teacher to do a special run of such a class. Also music theory is just theory, it's totally insufficient without also actually practicing improv as doing it in real-time is a much harder challenge.

I wouldn't doubt if learning guitar or piano would help with this aspect, but I know plenty of people who learned it just fine on wind instrument if they want to. It's not too surprising especially for those learning wind instruments - taking a solo in high school is already scary for a lot of people, and even more so when they don't even have music to play or practice ahead of time. Also there is admittedly probably a higher barrier of entry to improv on wind instruments so a lot of the focus necessarily has to be on achieving a baseline technical proficiency before it even makes sense to think about improv (if they don't put in the prerequisite technical work, it would be hard to move to improv). For example, with guitar or piano, right off the bat I can play any note in tune and sound at least halfway okay. On a wind instrument, even playing the most basic note will sound quite bad at first, and generally the range of frequency is limited for beginners and learning to extend it can take many years. Playing in tune likewise takes years.

Anyway, all that said, I entirely agree, if someone really likes music, it's hard to go wrong with also learning guitar or piano. Piano in particular, as one of the most versatile instruments, used in so many genres, and can help with learning fundamental theory, composition, and even gives a very good sense of rhythm as the two hands have to act independent of each other in a way that other instruments normally don't have to. If I had to go back and learn a different instrument, piano would be a likely candidate.

Being in Band, one learns Music; being in a band, one learns music. The attrition rate of band students in extracurricular or post-high-school musical endeavors is a bit disappointing. It is similar to the kids forced through piano lessons who quit whenever they have a chance.

My experience playing the clarinet was the same as yours.