The harmonies in both series tend to be most unusual without being self-sufficient. They run parallel to the system of earlier masters without seeming related to it. The meaning of this statement will perhaps be clear by a reference to two of the short studies in opus 65. In the first of these the right hand plays continuously in ninths, in the second it plays in sevenths--major, not minor. The effect of both is presumably melodic; that is, we are to listen to a melody, played not in octaves, but in ninths or sevenths, the latter of which may be said to be almost the harshest interval in music. Now this is not so much an expansion of harmony as it is a concentration on a particular interval, which is, as it were, extracted from all relation to our harmonic system and given an isolated independence. Then it is made to stalk alongside the general progression of the music. This is no hour to speak of forced effects in music. Music is expanding about us and touching notes we never dreamed of, and we may hardly venture to criticize without running the risk of finding in the end that we had a cloddish ear, insensitive to a nascent beauty since grown resplendent. Yet in all open-mindedness it is hard not to find Scriabin’s harmonic procedures arbitrary and often dry as dust. Few of his short pieces are genial. There is a sort of stiffness in them and they are strangely barren. Leaving aside the early ones which are close to Schumann and Chopin, one comes upon a _Satanische Dichtung_, opus 36, which is lineally descended from Liszt’s Mephisto waltz, then upon two short pieces, opus 57, the one called _Désir_, the other _Caresse dansée_; a Poem and a Prelude, opus 59; and Two Poems, opus 63, the first called _Masque_, the second _Etrangeté_. These last seem to us the best.