A 17-year-old pupil at Friends’ School in Lisburn, County Antrim, has become the first student in the 137-year history of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) to pass the Grade 8 piano exam using a repertoire written exclusively for the left hand.

Freya Terris began learning the piano at age four and had reached Grade 7 before a long-term injury and subsequent surgery in 2024 left her unable to use her right hand for playing. She initially believed she would never sit the Grade 8 exam.

Her piano teacher, Lisburn native Rory Dowse, proposed asking the board to allow a one-handed repertoire. The board agreed, and Terris spent roughly a year relearning the instrument with only her left hand. She passed the exam, for which she had to perform pieces that demand rapid movement and technical complexity across the full keyboard.

In response to the achievement, the ABRSM has added a one-handed repertoire to its 2027–28 syllabus for Grades 6–8. A collection titled “Piano Music for One Hand” had already been launched in 2023 for Grades 1–5, and the advanced grades were expanded following Terris’s result.

Dowse noted that his own pedagogical lineage, through his teacher Peter Tuite and American pianist Leon Fleisher, links directly to the left-hand repertoire. Fleisher lost the use of his right hand to focal dystonia at the height of his career and built much of his later work on music written for the left hand alone.

Terris plans to study music at university after completing secondary school and has named Cambridge, Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin as possible destinations.