I disagree.
I had a music theory teacher who was a PhD. She was a musical genius. The math for music is incredibly complicated; it's not just playing an instrument if you want to learn composing. Moving through the circle of fifths or backwards through fourths isn't easy even though there are rules. The program I went through was extremely rigorous. I was taking Calculus and Physics at the same time and believe me, I'd rather have the teacher hold up an F in calculus than have the teacher play something of mine that sounded terrible.
Music has its own math, its own language and its own rules. It's not the same as picking up and playing guitar hero. You've got to have the correct key, the correct time, correct tempo, know what the Italian words are for faster, arpegiating a chord, loud or soft, what the dots at the end of some bars mean not to mention the D.S. Al Coda.
If you know the movable 'do' system, you can create any key's scales such as major, minor, melodic minor, Harmonic Minor, Lydian, Phrygian and so on as well as any type of chord from a simple 1st, third and fifth to adding suspended notes and sevenths.
Believe me, we weren't judged because we were able to finish a piece of music as an exercise, we were judged on original music which a lot of people took really hard. Keep in mind we're not talking about popular music, we had to write music written in the style of the period of the late 1700s to some modern classical music which to me sounded like cr*p.
I disagree.
I think you misunderstood me. I didn't say that getting a PhD in music would be no more difficult or complicated than writing a few notes on a piece of music paper. What I said was that I bet anything that getting the PhD in music (actually, in piano) did not involve spending inordinate amounts of time in the lab, and that I don't know what the heck it involves. There really is nothing judgmental in that.