First, this is an assumption. I have not studied classical music but I have the impression that a typical exercise is playing scales in all keys.
Second, I am a (amateur) jazz musician. In jazz, you improvise. You have to know all kinds of scales in all keys to know what palette of notes and idioms you have to choose from. But in classical music, you are interpreting the notes as written. It seems to me that you don’t really care about scales, but you care about practicing the piece that you are playing.
I am certain that the classical musicians will tell me what an idiot I am for not realizing that…what? What am I missing here? The only thing I can imagine is that it develops dexterity on the instrument, but so would playing any number of written pieces.
My piano teacher explained that it is so I will be familiar with the key of a piece I’m playing.
If I’m in the mindset of the key of A, I will know that the C, F, and G notes are all sharped, and I won’t have to think about it as much because I’ll know ahead of time where my fingers are not only supposed to go but not allowed to go.
And I just read over that and it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I’m sure someone will come along shortly and explain why much better
I agree with Runs With Scissors. For a pianist (which is the instrument I know) you play scales faster and faster to get your fingers limbered up, too.
It’s a warmup exercise. Helps get your muscles moving the right way, and you thinking the right way, before you actually start playing music. And it’s not always just scales. When I was in the band back in high school, we had a set of warmups we had to go through at the beginning of practice. Scales, arpeggios, simple musical ditties, stuff like that. Just a variety of different things to play to get that range of motion going.
On an instrument without keys or frets, like the strings, scales are a good way to work on intonation. They develop your manual dexterity in hitting the string at exactly the right place, and help you discover which fingers/notes you’re having trouble with.
An end in itself. Contrary to the flaky stereotype that often follows musicians, really trained musicians tend to be scarily professional, right down to their appearance and speech.
It’s not just musicians that do this - actors will warm up by practicing tongue twisters, or often ‘patter songs’ from Gilbert and Sullivan, such as this one from The Mikado:
They also do vocal warmups such as just making consonant sounds, such as ‘p-t-k, b-d-g’
The “a lot of classical music is composed of scales and scale fragments” bit was my first thought upon seeing the title of this thread. I started practicing scales well before I could play most of the pieces that incorporate them, and I still remember the moment – though not the title of the piece – when I was playing something and suddenly all of that practice finally made sense/paid off.
Now the bit where we’d spend an hour before practice balancing on one foot waxing the band director’s car, I suspect, had nothing to do with musical aptitude.
Classical guitar player here. I’m having a hard time understanding how a jazz player could even ask such a question. You gotta practice the fundamentals, even if you’re just gonna make shit up.
It’s like most any learned skill; the better your grasp of the fundamentals the better you will be able to perform overall. By practicing the most basic parts of a process, those parts become more or less automatic, leaving you able to focus more of your attention on the more difficult / creative parts.
I suggest that if you add some scales to your practice routine, in a matter of some months you will be a significantly better player. Look around for some scale exercises and do some every day, even if it’s only five minutes. If in six months you can’t honestly say that you are a better, smoother, faster player, I’ll gladly refund your money.
BTW, I am in total awe of people who can just make up music on the fly. If I don’t have a paper full of little dots in front of me, I can’t play at all.
I guess I don’t follow either. I am self-taught; I don’t limber up with scales, but I didn’t have lessons which involved a teacher blocking out a structured set of scales. But I do have grooves I set up and use to work through scale-based licks and get warmed up.
But CWG how is that a surprise? Any music genre that involves a bit of dexterity -and classical surely qualifies - requires a routine of limbering up. The fact that Classical has a disciplined approach to that just fits.
I think you misread the OP. He said he does understand why jazz musicians need to practice scales in order to be able to improvise. They need to know their scales because they they are going to make shit up. What was puzzling to him was why classical musicians need to do so, when they are just playing the notes as written. (Others, I take it, have already given the answer.)
My ex’s family has a few world-famous violinists in it. Both of my ex-bro’s in law are superstars in the field. While in that family, I had endless opportunities during holidays and whatnot to hear them practice. And they did, every day, for hours. Always starting with scales. It was what they did, it got things going and supported the fundamentals from which everything springs.
I was a P.A. on a few Billy Joel music videos in the early 1980’s. ( Tell Her About It, Uptown Girl and While The Night Is Still Young ). While setting up for some work on While The Night Is Still Young, we were at the ( much-missed and beloved ) Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ. Loading in backstage. So, what’s backstage? An old beat up upright piano on a roll-around metal frame.
Instead of hiding in his trailer, Billy hung out backstage. Because - interestingly to me, since I was and am a rabid fan - at some level he’s the guy he was at 14. A bit socially shy, happy to sit at the piano and croon and bang out songs he likes instead of making small talk. And so there was Billy. Playing music by The Police.
I asked him about it. He said he loved their work, was listening in the limo on the way in, and so sat there singing " Roxanne" and " Message In A Bottle", etc. I asked him if he every did scales and he laughed. Said yeah, every single day. Apparently back when he started to get some real heat ( 1975-ish ), his former piano teacher ran into his mother at the market or somesuch and said that she’d heard his name on the radio, and was William making sure to practice his scales? He said it was important to warm his hands up that way.
When it comes to wind instruments, scales also just help you get used to making the alterations to each of the scale degrees. You know, so you don’t play C natural when you’re playing in A. You have to move a lot of fingers at once for a single note change.
Yeah, you’re looking at notes on a page, but it’s not as if every sharp or flat is written. If you are in the mindset of the wrong scale, you will play the wrong note.
On piano, though, I’d argue that scales don’t really help as much in this regard because you don’t really need to think about the key to play a scale. Your fingers are just automatically in the position to hit the right notes, except for in a couple of keys (Gb and Db). And it’s not as if you keep your hands in that position the entire time your are playing in that key. Plus, you rarely are just playing just one note at a time. I bet coordination and muscle warmups are a more important part.
Also, I’d say that, when you are playing written music, you aren’t really just playing the notes on the page. You are playing patterns and probably little riffs you’ve memorized before, even if you are sight reading, since you’ve probably seen the figure before. Rarely are you concentrating on individual notes.
Or at least that’s what I was taught. I was never very good at reading piano music. I do read one note at time.
