Here's the truth most graduate programs don't prepare you for: you will, at some point in your career, run choir rehearsals without a pianist. Sometimes for a single week. Sometimes for an entire season. The directors who handle this well develop a set of skills that, frankly, every choral director should have anyway. The directors who handle it badly produce rough rehearsals where everyone is frustrated and nothing gets accomplished.

Music literacy is a core skill. Like reading and arithmetic, it can be taught to almost every student given the right instruction and time. But it's largely not being taught in modern choral programs, which have shifted over the last several decades toward a model where the director feeds the music to the singers via the piano, the singers learn it by repetition, and the actual reading of music — the ability to look at a page of notation and produce the sound — never develops.