Creativity Quote by James Galway

For James Galway, that throwaway-sounding line is a quiet manifesto against the way classical training can turn music into homework. “Scales” are supposed to be the driest unit of practice: repetitive finger patterns, metronome clicks, the instrumental equivalent of running laps. By refusing to see them as “abstract,” Galway collapses the false divide between technique and expression. He’s saying the raw materials already contain the music, if you treat them like language instead of calisthenics.

The intent is practical, almost pedagogical: don’t practice scales to get through scales; practice them as phrasing, breath, color, and character. For a flutist especially, the danger of abstraction is acute. Flute tone is naked - no reed to disguise a thin airstream, no keys to hide behind. The scale is where you learn whether a note blooms, whether the line carries, whether your sound stays human when it gets exposed.

The subtext is also a rebuke to a certain conservatory mindset that prizes correctness over communication. Galway’s career - a virtuoso who also became a crossover celebrity and a mass-market ambassador for the flute - depended on making “technical” playing feel like direct speech. Calling scales non-abstract is a way of insisting that the audience can hear your practice habits. If scales are lifeless, your Mozart will be lifeless too.

Contextually, it lands in the late-20th-century push to demystify classical music: less priesthood, more craft. The scale isn’t a prerequisite for art; it’s the smallest available piece of it.