To-day we turn our attention to the Seventh of Heinz Stockhausen's Eleven Curious Little Piano Pieces. This one came into being in 1955 and lasts six minutes forty seconds; but may we from the outset warn Members that the work is a frightful failure! Let us here examine the reasons.

For the first minute and a half we hear a kind of perverted passacaglia - a single C sharp is slowly repeated about fifteen times, and after each repetition there is a kind of flourish of single notes from all parts of the keyboard - but only about five chords; "Oh dear!" we cannot help thinking, "it's another of  those self-styled 'composers' with absolutely no sense of harmony!" (It is also something like Sylvestreff is it not? but he came ten years later.)

There are two things wrong with this section: 1) instead of the single note repeated fifteen times we should have an interesting motif or passage repeated fifteen times. One of the first laws of æsthetics is the old rule which governs repetition; if something is going to be repeated, that is, it should be something which tasks the sensitive man's power of recognition to its limit - it must fill and almost overtax the mind, in such a way that the  recognition of its return will be quite difficult of achievement and nevertheless once accomplished all the more pleasurable precisely because it is complex and full of interest. In other words, it is just an insult to the listener to repeat something that is too simple, and easy to remember. As always, we may ask "What would Brahms have done?"

The second defect of Stockhausen's plan is that the decorative flourishes or rather flurries seem designed to be as confusing and instantly forgettable as possible. They contain no melody, no harmony, no counterpoint, no rhythm, no aim, and no Art; for the most part they are isolated notes which jump all over the range of the keyboard in the most confusing way possible. Few composers set out with the intention of writing pieces which the auditor will find as confusing unmemorable and unmusical as possible, but this was clearly the case here.

By the bye, apart from the idea of a dud passacaglia, Members might consider and compare Sibelius's well-known oboe melody on one note from the trio of his Second Symphony. What a world of difference is there!

Eventually the repetitions cease but the piece continues; the "composer" finds another way in which to bewilder his auditors. We can in fact imagine him thinking "What can I do next to annoy them?"

Well what follows is a minute of entirely nondescript music, except that at two minutes ten seconds we are almost certain that we hear again a hint of that old German nursery tune!

Then between the two minutes thirty seconds mark and the three minute mark all we hear is two single notes (a low B flat and a low C sharp) repeated many times one after the other bare of any accompaniment or sense of rhythm. It is entirely absurd of course; has the "composer" ever attempted to explain any of this we wonder? We doubt he could.

Next, between three minutes and four minutes, we must endure a passage very similar to the first, except that this time the single passacaglia note is an A instead of a C sharp.

There is no point in describing how the rest of it goes - it is very much the same and Members may imagine. Perhaps the work's only achievement in the end is that it is all of a piece. But its "composition" cannot have taken longer than half an hour. It must be the most unpleasant piano piece we have ever heard!

Perhaps Stockhausen imagined himself in an U-Boot in the North Atlantic. The repeated notes represent the Royal Navy SONAR, and the fast flourishes fish large and small flashing by. It's an idea, isn't it?

some of Roger Smalley's performances of these things stashed away somewhere. Whatever became of him we wonder?