Certain listeners will hear a reference to the middle movement of Webern's Piano Variations, Op. 27, in the opening of this six-minute piano piece. The elder, Austrian composer is the decisive figure in Stockhausen's pantheon of musical influences. Webern had taken the ideas of Schoenberg's twelve-tone system and saw the implications of that new language to their natural conclusion. Stockhausen took the same approach to Webern's ideas, creating serialism, and then relaxed certain tenets of that ideal when it became too constrictive. Around that point he began writing these piano pieces in the early 1950s, and the forces of logic and imagination were in top form, as can be easily heard in this score. The biggest challenge to becoming enraptured with this piece is unlearning all the negative industry that floats around a genius like Stockhausen. Though he did have a hand in assembling this situation (as did Beuys in visual art) the product is terribly significant and moving. One external influence that made this piece better was David Tudor, an American pianist whose command of contemporary idiom and sheer musicality allowed Stockhausen to revise Klavierstück IV-VII to include musical contours previously regarded as not performable. This is not the most difficult piece in the series to perform, featuring an investigation into overtones and harmonics as they pertain to the piano. Equal temperament, the way certain discrepancies in the division of the octave into 12 notes are dealt with by allowing comparisons of resonance to work or not work as notes performed in different registers fail to match up perfectly. This is not an attack on a method of defining music; this is allowing the fundamental idea of Western music provide the lyric tension for a piece. It is an original idea -- Stockhausen has appeared inexhaustible in this way at times -- but the articulation of the idea is what makes it worth hearing. Few works can meander in such a compelling way; it is not until the overtone waves of conflicting notes bash into each other that the plan coheres for its audience, but it does, and the journey is fascinating. Klavierstück VII is profound and entertaining stuff, and no serious listener will be able to feel that the work is fully assimilated, exhausted, after 100 performances. [allmusic.com]