160 Eight-Measure Exercises, Op. 821 No. 3, by Czerny
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Get the practice plan for 160 Eight-Measure Exercises, Op. 821 No. 3
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- Hear it through at Slow (25 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 4 to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in C major. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: C, G7, F6 and G6. Play each one as a block in your left hand and say its name, so you know what the harmony is before the left hand has to move.
- Learn the left hand of the same bars on its own. Keep it quiet and even: it is the floor the tune stands on.
- Put hands together at Slow, 25 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (38 bpm) once Slow feels easy three times in a row. Then learn the next 8 bars the same way: right hand, left hand, together.
- Play the whole piece (under a minute) from the start, at whatever speed keeps it going. A steady run with a few slips beats a fast one that stops.
About this piece
Czerny's Op. 821 is a late collection of 160 short exercises, each exactly eight bars long. This one keeps the right hand playing quick pairs of thirds, rocking between two neighbouring positions, over short chords in the left hand.
How to play it
Keep both notes of each third exactly together, with a loose wrist and the fingers close to the keys. Practise slowly with a slight accent on each beat before letting it run.
Reading it, and printing it
The score opens in Artform's reader, which shows the music as engraved notation and plays it back so you can hear the line before you try it. You can slow the tempo down, loop a passage that is not working yet, and print the page when you would rather have paper on the stand.
The file itself is MusicXML, which MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and Dorico all open, so the notes are yours to keep whatever you read them in.
Edition: Mutopia Project #2062, in the public domain. Converted to MusicXML by Artform and checked note for note against the original.
More free Czerny sheet music
Who Czerny was
Austrian composer and piano teacher who studied directly with Beethoven as a boy and went on to teach a young Franz Liszt, making him one of the few people in history to form a direct musical bridge between the two. He wrote an almost unbelievable volume of piano studies, well over a thousand opus numbers in total, including The School of Velocity, designed purely to build the technique a pianist needs to play everything else. Generations of students have spent more hours with Czerny's exercises than with almost any other composer's actual pieces, whether they know his name or not.
Learn the music behind it
Reading a piece and understanding it are different skills. If you want the harmony under this one, the chord trainer teaches chords the way songs use them, and the scale pages cover the fingering for every key, including C major.