You are quite correct, very remiss of me, also Conductors and composers although these last two would no doubt play an instrument.

Sometimes I see some guitar teaching sites and in one of them there was a guy who had been asked to teach Stairway to Heaven. And the guy took a lot of work to tab the whole song. If people were used to sheets they wouldn't have that problem and that kind of work (by ear). Sometimes notation in music is golden.

I think we still haven't resolved this basic issue in this thread, and the last point you make here really gives the game away. I suspect the only reason we have any disagreement at all is because we're all working with different personal definitions of what a 'musician' is, and what the word 'genuine' means.

Martin Carthy, Daniel Barenboim, Paul McCartney, Hector Berlioz, and Frederica von Stade are all 'musicians' who have spent their lives mastering their particular musical art and pushing its limits as far as it can go. But there's no escaping that they're all different kinds of musicians, and to separate out some of them as 'genuine', and others as not, on the basis of their ability to read a score doesn't seem helpful, to me.

Some of the most brilliant musicians in history didn't know how to read music, but with today's access to information, I would say, why not learn it?