And that's Jazz -

But sight reading IS a more useful necessary skill for any serious musician. Certainly, from my own point of view, playing in church, accompanying and teaching, I'm much more grateful for having worked at my sight reading than at my singing! If the choir needs help with how a vocal line sounds, I can play it; I needn't necessarily sing it. That job is theirs - that's why they sing and I play! But if my sight singing the lowest of three parts was fantastic, yet my sight reading was poor, I would flounder. We need to know, as instrumentalists, how to reproduce, from printed music, the notes that are required, with the correct rhythm, and that being understood, the issue at hand is to make music from those notes. Being able to pitch them with our voices, when voice is not our instrument, with no regard for musicality, is indeed a dubious test of our ability to play our chosen instrument.

I'm working with one pupil at the minute at AB Grade 8 Aural tests, and two TG Grade 8s, and the time I'm wasting on damage limitation in the singing questions with the former is more than balanced by what the other two are gaining from being able to spend longer on the discussion of style/form/etc. The AB pupil, incidentally, isn't putting in much sight reading practice either - any spare time seems to be gong on practising sight singing in order not to make a fool of herself!

Addendum - on the original question, which I've managed to ignore - sorry! - I find my male pupils are generally better than my female ones. I doubt if my sample is representative, though!

Sight reading is fine, and I agree a very necessary skill but sight singing, and just singing in general just give me the horrors. Unaccompanied is not a problem on piano

In fact, I'm going to start a poll.

Surely the whole point of the "so-called singing" tests is to check if you have an "internal knowledge" of the sounds you are going to create before you press the keys. I'm sure most of us can "sing" a scale or an arpeggio given the starting note. The tests are simply some way of checking how well developed that sense is - e.g. one's understanding of (generally fairly simple) intervals. You can't use sight reading on the instrument to test the same thing because as long as you know which key to press you can get the correct note. I think it's related to the ability to play by ear.

Incidentally my first oboe teacher reckoned that a well developed musician would hear the sound they were going to create on the instrument from the dot on the page and if ever I was struggling with a study or piece she would say "well can you sing it?".

I think that when I look over a piece of music before learning it, I can hear a rough idea of how it should sound in my head. Might not be the correct notes but it's an outline, I never feel a need to try singing any of it?

I've learned quite a lot of things by ear without developing singing skills.

It might not be very advanced, but one of the tests (at least in grades 6-8, I'm not sure about the lower grades) does consist of sight singing a short melody. I'm sure it's simpler than what singers are asked to do in their exams, but it's still "sight singing".

How would you demonstrate (to an examiner) that you have acquired this skill?

Telepathy?

At least for piano (and similar instruments where the notes are in plain sight), I still think that singing is highly irrelevant. There must be a reason why TG and ABRSM have different stances on the whole thing.

I guess you're going to fail that bit then.

Lest we imagine that ABRSM have put aural tests in to give the examiner a laugh, take a look at these extracts from the "These Music Exams" publication.

"The purpose of aural tests is to establish the link between listening to
music and playing music. Most candidates find that their aural abilities
improve with regular practice and that they gain confidence when
aural training forms part of every lesson. The speed and accuracy with
which candidates respond to the aural tests can tell the examiner a lot
about the candidate’s musical make-up and help to form an overall
picture of the candidate’s abilities".

"Candidates often do much better in this section than they imagine at
the time. These tests only take a few minutes but tell the examiner a
great deal about the all-round aural awareness of the candidate. The
different sections cover many aspects of listening, including some
interval training with the sight-singing and recognition of various
elements of a short piece played by the examiner. Marks are not
awarded for each part of the tests or deducted for mistakes but reflect
the candidate’s overall response. Those who prefer not to sing can
hum or whistle. It is not the quality of the sound that matters
and examiners, who are well aware of the challenges faced by candidates
with changing voices, can tell all they need to know, regardless of
vocal quality, in this small but important part of the exam".

Of course we can always choose to disagree with what ABRSM think about aural tests. Or scales. Or sight reading. Or.....

The quality, or otherwise, of the playing reflects accurately the inner abilities of the candidate. Singing often fails to show this, given the noises that come out of the mouths of some who play beautifully despite not being able to sight-sing. Or just sing.



Yep. That is the route I took a few years ago. It was a liberating experience.

I was never on any other route to begin with...
I'm sure neither was Bach or Mozart. The ability to compose and perform music did exist before ABRSM did.

When I undertook Grade 8 piano (and got a distinction) I had never played a scale or had an aural lesson in my life. Nerves made me have to restart one arpeggio, hence I lost one mark in that section, and the only marks I lost in the aural were because I couldn't be depended upon to pitch my voice accurately. I'm a little better at that now, as I practise these tests with pupils - yes, practice does help - but this improvement hasn't enhanced my playing. Any enhancement to that has come through practising playing the instrument - strangely enough...My ability to play scales accurately and with good articulation is as a result of doing that for so long in pieces of real music. Not that we're really discussing the merits of scales here - but my response is to the implication that AB exams are the only way to go; "If they have it in their syllabus, it has to be necessary." It's not the case!

Yes, my own playing receives gratifying respect as a general rule. I suspect this has more to do with the 2 to 5 hours a day (depending on circumstances and demands) practise I have done throughout my long career than with any other 'musical' abilities I may be able to demonstrate. None of this time was wasted on scales, either. The repertoire contains everything we need to know.


I was taught for a while by a vicious old bat whose sole aim in life appeared to be to destroy my love of playing the piano - happily, she failed. At the start of my teaching career, when faced by a problem I would ask myself what this woman would have done, then do the opposite. I do not quite go to this extreme when considering the good ole AB, but it comes close sometimes.

Did they both just write down what came into their heads without any knowledge/study of or reference to the already large body of musical theory?



Well, I'm not sure I'm quite ready to build a funeral pyre of the various books and articles I have on oboe playing all of which advocate long notes and slow scales as the basis for a solid technique.

Hehe. I consistently fail to make myself clear - a terrible trait in a teacher.

I am talking purely as a pianist when I discuss the relevance of scales, and nearly always forget to mention this. Sorry. Not for a moment am I advocating that other instrumentalists ditch them; I am not qualified to give an opinion.

By doing the test in which you mark a score where what you hear is different from what it indicates, as in the examination for Part I of my degree or in the T/G grade exams. This is far closer to real life for a conductor or a chamber music coach. I don't mind singing, but lots of people do, and this test is better anyway.

In some cases, quite possibly! I'm sure they benefited, in any case, from not being tied to a two-dimensional syllabus, from which they weren't allowed to move on from until they had mastered every detail at every level. We'll never know now whether or not Mozart was au fait with alto clefs yet when he wrote the Twinkle Twinkle variations.

When my son did his jazz exams, he LOVED that part of the aural test!- just goes to show....





I have just switched to TG for SOME pupils- it is a better syllabus for SOME. I think the aural requirements are harder in TG. The intervals questions come in quite early grades! I think the sight reading is much easier with TG though!

However, to answer the OP questions, are girls better than boys at aural? In the case of my pupils, I would say that my boys generally score higher marks in AB aural exams- even the boy with the breaking voice last term who had a range of about 5 notes when he took his grade 4- I think with a sympathetic examiner, he scored 17 or 18. Yes- the boys don't like doing the singing- one whistled in one exam, but they definitely aren't any worse, and my male pupils generally seem to to get better marks for aural! Maybe it's just the particular boys I teach?