In this regard, great composers do not need to sit at a [piano] keyboard to compose music.
I agree completely.
I was fortunate to have a lot of FANTASTIC teachers, many of whom are/were considered tops in their respective parts of the musical world. My tuba teachers have included
many of the names you know. My voice teachers are known internationally. My organ professors, my bassoon professor, my horn professor, all great and names recognizable. I spent time studying all these non-tuba things because I wanted access to these great teachers and knew there was only so much we could talk about if I walked in with my tuba.
At the undergraduate level and two graduate degrees at major institutions, I never had an ear-training class. I passed out of all of them via the proficiency exams.
Blah blah blah. Fan-frickin-tastic for you, you say. Why do I bring this up, you ask? Because as exceptional as some of these teachers are/were (some are no longer alive), it turned out a chunk was missing, that I didn't even realize was missing. Why would I? I started keyboard instruments at 7, wind instruments at 10 and had learned how to play everything found in a band or orchestra, including harp, to at least a level of competence, many to a level of performance.
But one teacher changed it all.
LISTEN UP ANYONE PRESENTLY AT THE BLAIR SCHOOL AT VANDERBILT.
Her name is Marianne Ploger, a student of Nadia Boulanger (google that name, young 'uns, if you don't know it, as you should) who has taken music cognition and perception skill pedagogy many steps further.
Every lesson was like getting a new set of ears.
Studying with her was like taking every ounce of musical knowledge I'd gathered from all the other teachers and zipping it up quite neatly into a single, fundamental package; fundamental, yet expanded my skills to a point that I wasn't even aware was possible.
A component of that was the acquisition of pitch. I am a hardcore proponent of fixed-do solfegge. If you want to acquire pitch, it's more difficult if you keep moving do. Movable-do intends to include a sense of scale degree/function, but that's fundamentally separate from pitch. If you take a child and the color "yellow," it will be much more difficult for that child to learn his colors if one time "yellow" is "yellow," but the next time it's "orange," and the next time it's "chartreuse." I believe a great many more doors are opened when you call a pitch by the same name all the time. When pitch is acquired, it turns out it can be quite easy to do four-part dictation, of at least 16 measures, in a single hearing with zero mistakes. Of course, there are several other components to the pedagogy more than are described here, but suffice it to say that I once found myself surprised to be doing modal tetrachord identification, with the notes played one at a time across the range of the piano.
To me, a major downfall of our music education system here (the USA) is the outcome-based model. Schools fundamentally push for the test, the concert, the end-game. Proper education must be process-based. When the process is correct, the outcome follows as the only possible outcome. You can get a band/orchestra as a whole to put on a decent performance, but what level of skill can be found in each individual? So many of us were taught to read music by spot identification, i.e., a note on this line is a G, a note in this space is an E, etc. The problem with that is that it fails to incorporate reading music in a way that involves hearing it. How many times have you seen a singer say, "Can you play my note?" I mean C'MON! Can you imagine a professional basketball player saying, "Which one is the free throw line?" But we have "professionals" who don't have/know pitch. Can you imagine an actor saying, "What sound does a 'k' make?," but we have so many instrumentalists who have difficulty playing in tune, because they don't know pitch in a way that's fully integrated. If you have truly, completely, learned how to read music, you will never, NEVER, have to listen to a recording, or have something played for you to hear how it's supposed to go, because you know by looking at it EXACTLY what it is going to sound like. If you close your eyes and think of a yellow banana, can you not "see" a yellow banana? Well, what if you imagine "hearing" a bassoon play an f#? Can you hear an f#? Can you hear it with the sound of a bassoon? What about a tympani playing a Bb? What about a c minor chord, second inversion, played by a trumpet, two horns and a trombone section? It's a very short step from being able to do that and being able to do it on sight when looking at a score.There are a great many facets of our imagination we are encouraged through our lives to develop. I happen to believe that the aural component of our imagination, for most people, to be really underdeveloped, if developed much at all.
If you have acquired that skill set, you don't need a keyboard. Make no mistake, a fundamental and highly important relationship lies between the kinesthetic, visual and aural components of cognition and perception. There are stories of Beethoven's editor paying him a visit, only to find him banging the hell out of a piano with broken strings and completely out of tune. He wasn't playing it for sound, obviously, but rather that relationship between the physical placement of notes/keys and the way that facilitated hearing it in his head.
That Beethoven composed when he was completely deaf is not really that impressive. He had been a hearing person and had an education, training and background that placed all the groundwork. If you were born sighted and traveled the world, but lost your sight due to an accident at age 35, would you suddenly not remember what the Eiffel Tower looked like? Would you forget what the grass looks like? No.
The impressive part of what Beethoven did had nothing to do with his hearing.
If you live anywhere near Nashville and wish to increase your aural skills/cognition/perception, you should start taking lessons with Marianne Ploger. Assuming she has room. I've seen accomplished, well-experienced musicians, people who thought they'd had all the training they needed, walk out of their first lessons with her muttering to themselves, "I...know... nothing." "I have to go practice. Or walk off a pier. I don't know which to do first." Or just, "Holy S**t."
FWIW. We can always learn more.
A great deal also comes from doing a lot, a lot more, then much more, then realizing it's less than 1% of what you need to do. As an example, it's thought by some that we have less than possibly 40% of the music Haydn wrote. He'd get up in the morning, pray, compose, burn what he didn't like, pray, compose some more, burn what he didn't like, pray, and go to bed.
/tome