Author: Matt74
Date: 2022-10-04 02:08
If it has become only a bunch of busywork, students may not understand how important and desirable it is. If teachers were not paying attention, and perhaps were not properly trained themselves, they may have de-emphasized scales as a consequence.
I believe that it's the mental habit of MAKING scales in your head that improves your playing when sight reading, performing, or improvising.
It was only after I stopped looking at the music, and started working them out in my head, that I started getting any real benefit. I wouldn't have been able to do this had I never read them at all, but it was figuring things out myself that made it work.
1. If it's easy for a student to memorize music by simply reading it, reading the scales is probably fine, at least initially
2. Even so, they will only be familiar with the scale patterns that they read.
3. They may not understand what they are doing.
Depending on the music and scales they are working on, it may not be obvious that the scales are helping with the music. (If you are sightreading Bach it's wildly obvious...Ed Sueta, maybe less so...) They may conceptualize the scales as different things, rather than various forms of the same thing. If scales are presented in isolation from "music", they may not intuit how scale steps relate to one another, and also relate to harmony.
4. They will have less of the mental flexibility necessary to put the scales into practice.
5. It makes additional sharps and flats seem more intimidating.
6. It also tends to separate "music making" from "wood shedding", or "expression" from "technique". Insofar as it's possible, students should always be musical.
I guess I'm saying that it's one thing to properly emphasize learning scales and arpeggios, and another to simply require memorization from a certain book. Of course, it makes sense to standardize things in auditions and so on. But, like a lot of things in schools, the means sometimes gets confused with the end.
- Matthew Simington
Post Edited (2022-10-04 02:12)
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The Clarinet BBoard
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