Asked how he made his music more forceful than others, Keith Moon, The Who’s hellraising drummer, replied: “Hit the drums harder.” The advice would have stood him a strong chance of a GCSE in music.

To the consternation of musicians, tutors and critics, an inability to understand sheet music has now become no hindrance to success at GCSE. Students can achieve a Grade A without reading or writing a single note.

Research by BBC Music Magazine has revealed that none of the main examination boards awards more than 20 per cent of total marks for being able to read music.

Damon Albarn, the singer and songwriter for Blur and Gorillaz, whose debut opera was performed at the Royal Opera House last month, called the situation disgraceful and said that it could cut young people off from their musical heritage.

Graham Sheffield, artistic director of the Barbican, one of the most important music venues in the country, said: “Reading music isn’t the only way to do it — a lot of jazz and world musicians do it by ear and achieve literacy by memorisation and improvisation. But without a grasp of the basic grammar of the subject it’s like trying to cook a Michelin-starred meal without knowing what any of the ingredients taste like.”

Julian Lloyd Webber, the cellist, said it was like “trying to study a language without studying the alphabet”.

Previous generations of 16-year-olds studying music as an academic subject at school were under much more pressure to demonstrate a proper understanding of written music. An O-level music paper for the Associated Examination Board in 1978, for example, asked students to set a verse of poetry to music on a page of empty staves, with credit given for good accentuation of the words and an appropriate melody.

Now the national curriculum does not mention staff notation until Key Stage 3 (ages 11 to 14) and pupils need only to “identify” it.

The music GCSE exam is divided into composition, performance and a listening paper. Performances can be improvised. Compositions examined by the Oxford Cambridge and RSA exam boards need only to be in recorded form. Edexcel and the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance exam boards expect to see a score, but Edexcel does not mark it, and AQA says that a score can mean anything from a diagram to “a written account detailing the structure and content of the music”. The listening paper is made up of essay questions on set works and aural analysis.

Questions on notation account for such a small proportion of the marks that candidates can ignore them and still do well. As a consequence, music GCSE no longer prepares many students for further academic study, according to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which sets the subject criteria for the national curriculum, GCSE and A level.

After an investigation into the past 20 years of music GCSE and A-level equivalents this year, the authority drew damning conclusions about the decline in standards.

It reported that the listening paper was easier and that there was now “a very real issue over progression from GCSE to AS \ in the content of some syllabuses. This in many cases was a product of low expectations at GCSE rather than of inappropriately high expectations at AS.” Figures show that nearly five out of six students who take GCSE music drop out by the second year of A level.

Nigel Hildreth, head of music at Colchester Sixth Form College, said that he has to turn away about half of the pupils who have completed GCSE music and want to continue at A level because they can’t read music.

“The pressure of preparing youngsters \ in less than nine months means that insufficient time is available to bring sometimes very scant skills in music reading up to scratch,” he said.

Albarn, one of Mr Hildreth’s former pupils, is appalled by the lack of emphasis on reading music. He told the BBC magazine: “The idea of it being completely absent from the most important exams of your childhood is disgraceful. I used to write for small orchestras when I was 15. I sold my soul to the Devil and became a pop star and forgot about it, but in the past few years I have got back into orchestration after an almost 20-year hiatus. I’m so slow now. I think anyone interested in music should be forced to learn that discipline.”

He believes that his musical training has been invaluable, helping him to develop and explore new musical avenues. “If you don’t learn to read music then there’s a whole tradition that becomes very exclusive, and shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be something made to feel old-fashioned.”

Lloyd Webber said that it was ridiculous to ignore “a system of notation that has been developed over hundreds and hundreds of years and has stood the test of time” just to make exams easier. “It’s leaving anyone who wants to do music in the future with a severe disadvantage — a handicap.”

There are signs of a change of heart at the QCA, however. From next month KS3 national curriculum stipulates that requirements should include “using traditional staff notation”.

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