160 Eight-Measure Exercises No.1

Description

In C major and common time, the right hand moves smoothly through scales and thirds while the left leaps from chord tone to chord tone beneath it. Two quite different motions, a flowing line and a jumping bass, have to work at once within just eight bars.

Czerny's Op. 821 gathers 160 such exercises, each only eight bars long. A pupil of Beethoven and the teacher of Liszt, Czerny left close to a thousand opus numbers, a great many of them pedagogical, and the extreme brevity here is the design: isolate one movement and repeat it over and over. No. 1 takes under twenty seconds to play through, and its five-octave span means both hands must shift position as they go.

The aim is to make the right hand's smooth motion and the left hand's leaps work at the same time. If the right hand stalls whenever the left jumps, the exercise has done nothing. Move the left hand from the arm and keep the right independent, working from the fingers. It is short by design: playing it repeatedly, at varying tempos, is how it is meant to be used.

A set of 160 short studies by Czerny, each condensed into just eight measures so a single technical point can be worked on quickly. Their brevity makes them well suited to beginners building basic piano technique efficiently.