Refrain for three players (piano with woodblocks, vibraphone with alpine cowbells, and amplified celesta with antique cymbals) is a chamber music composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and is number 11 in his catalog of works.

[1] It was premiered on 2 October 1959 by David Tudor (piano), Cornelius Cardew (celesta), and a percussionist from the WDR Symphony Orchestra, Siegfried Rockstroh (vibraphone), at the Berlin Congresshalle, as part of an all-Stockhausen concert that also included Kreuzspiel, Zeitmaße, Zyklus, and the Klavierstücke I, IV, V, VII, VIII, and XI.

At an early performance in Venice, although a skeptical reviewer thought "Stockhausen's Refrain and Kontakte seem determined on the disorganization of all conventional musical factors", he nevertheless reported that the "concert had a tremendous success, far more than the normal events".

In a 1962 review of the printed score, Robert Henderson doubted whether "there are people with the energy and enthusiasm to work out in detail the precise significance of all these complex signs and then make from them a performance" and, if there were, whether "the labour involved could ever be justified by the end-product", pronouncing it merely "an amusing musical kaleidescope [sic] for those with unlimited amounts of unoccupied time".

Souster concluded that One cannot stress too often the importance of letting new music, serial, indeterminate, improvised or electronic, speak directly to the ear, uncluttered by preconceptions or by anxiety about the way the score works.

[15]The highest-profile attack on Refrain, however, was made as part of a political polemic by Cornelius Cardew, who had been Stockhausen's assistant and had played celesta in the world premiere.

In 1972 Hans Keller asked him to introduce a broadcast of the work on BBC Radio and Cardew, a recent convert to Marxism, seized on its comparative popularity as an opportunity to condemn the composition as "a part of the cultural superstructure of the largest-scale system of human oppression and exploitation the world has ever known: imperialism".

[16] Writing in what has been described as "the most vulgar style of Marxist conventions",[17] Cardew viewed the European avant garde, whose "abstruse, pseudo-scientific tendencies were encouraged in ivory tower conditions" as having been by 1959 "ready to crack from its own internal contradictions".