Pieces › First steps

Five fingers, five notes

C position and Ode to Joy

Each finger of your right hand gets its own key: thumb on C, then D, E, F, G. This is “C position,” the foundation of your first steps at the piano.

With these five notes you can already play Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, now the anthem of Europe.

Tips

• Don’t look at your fingers: each one stays over its key.
• A repeated note is played again with the same finger.

The five-finger scale

Go up from C to G, then back down. One finger per note, without moving your hand.

Ode to Joy

Watch out in measure 4: the dotted E lasts a beat and a half, and the D after it is short.