Almost no student has ever been excited to practice scales. Marian Lamoureux of Hinsdale has never met one. She assigns them anyway, every year, to almost every student, and she has reasons that go past tradition.
A scale is not busywork. It is the most efficient way to teach a hand to move evenly, to teach fingers to pass under the thumb without a bump, and to teach an ear what a key actually sounds like from the bottom to the top. A student who can play scales cleanly has hands that are ready for real music. A student who skips them spends years fighting their own fingers in every piece.
Why students hate them, and why that is fixable
Scales get a bad name because of how they are usually taught. A student is handed a sheet of them, told to play each one a set number of times, and left to grind. There is no music in that, and the student knows it.
Marian teaches scales as a tool with a purpose, not a punishment. She connects the scale to the piece. If a student is learning something in G major, they practice the G major scale that week and feel why it matters. The scale stops being abstract. It becomes the raw material the piece is built from.
She also keeps the daily dose small. Five focused minutes of scales beats twenty distracted ones. The point is clean, even, honest playing, not volume. A student who plays one scale slowly and listens to every note gets more from it than a student who rattles through six while thinking about lunch.
What scales actually build
Evenness is the first thing. A scale played slowly exposes every weak finger and every rushed note. The fourth and fifth fingers are usually the culprits, and the scale is where a student finds out.
The second thing is key awareness. A student who has played all the major and minor scales has felt the shape of every key under their hands. When they sit down with a new piece, the key signature is not a warning sign. It is familiar ground.
The third thing is speed that does not fall apart. Real repertoire asks for fast passages that stay even. That control comes from scale work done slowly first, then gradually brought up to tempo. There is no other reliable way to build it.
The arpeggio question
Arpeggios get the same treatment in Marian’s studio. They teach the hand to cover distance, to shift position smoothly, and to outline the chords that hold a piece together. A student who knows their arpeggios hears harmony differently. They start to recognize the chords inside the music they are playing.
She introduces them early and keeps them tied to repertoire, the same way she does with scales. The student is never practicing a pattern in a vacuum. They are building the exact skill the next piece will ask for.
The students who trust that and put in the small daily work pull ahead. The ones who refuse spend years wondering why hard passages stay hard. The scale was the answer the whole time.