page_title: Dante Boon
section_title: Musical works
hierarchical_section_title: Dante Boon / Musical works
caption_attribution_description: English: first song
context_page_description: Dante Boon is a Dutch composer and pianist. A member of the Wandelweiser composers collective, he is perhaps best known as an interpreter of experimental piano music. His own music has been performed internationally to wide acclaim.
context_section_description: John Eyles, writing for All About Jazz, has described Boon's works as "exquisite throughout, without a single wasted note or gesture to be heard." His CD clarinet (and piano), which features clarinetist Jürg Frey, was recommended by The New Yorker's Alex Ross and by Andy Hamilton in The Wire's Top 10 albums of contemporary music.
  Many of Boon's works are composed so as to give players room to discover their own way through the piece. His clarinet piece 3x, for example, consists of three staves of music containing pitches in three respective registers among which the clarinetist is free to move. In a program note, Michael Pisaro describes Boon's piano piece 14x as follows:
  Although the piece is quite slow, and is seemingly a simple series of sustained chords with an occasional beautiful melodic gesture, the technique employed is actually very challenging. No pedal is used, therefore, in order maintain the mostly 10-note sounds all fingers of both hands are employed, holding down keys for the whole piece. What at first seems nearly impossible reveals itself to be ingeniously composed to be just possible.
  In a review of Boon's 2 Delen (after Sam Sfirri), Paul Muller writes the following: 
  [A] subtle work featuring electric guitar and voice. The guitar plays a slow ascending scale and at certain points the voice joins. The pure pitches made for some beautiful sounds and overtones. When the voice and guitar met in unison a new cycle would start.
  
  His vocal piece Mirte, a setting of the first three stanzas of Antoine Beuger's translation of the Spiritual Canticle by John of the Cross, has been described as an "inward psychological turn of a voice trying to sing to itself."
caption: Excerpt from 2x Robert Creeley
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