Biography
Read his obituaries in the Seattle Times and Slipped Disc.
Recognized as one of today’s leading interpreters of contemporary music, flutist Paul Taub is known as a long-time Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle (retired, 2018), and as a presenter of innovative concerts with repertoire ranging from Bach to Takemitsu to Pēteris Vasks. He has performed widely across North America, Europe and in Central America and Asia, having appeared in venues such as Symphony Space/New York, Benaroya Hall/Seattle as well as twice at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, San Francisco’s Other Minds Festival, the Beijing Summer Festival and for the New York Flute Club. For more than twenty years he was the flutist and Executive Director of the Seattle Chamber Players, commissioning over 100 new works and performing in Moscow, St Petersburg, Beijing, Milan, Kiev, Copenhagen and other major European cities as well as presenting over 100 concerts in Seattle.
As a chamber musician, Taub has performed regularly with ensembles and collaborators as diverse as the Seattle Modern Orchestra, Byron Schenkman and Friends, the Seattle Symphony Chamber Music Series, pianist Jovino Santos Neto and guitarist Michael Partington. As a concerto soloist, he has appeared with Seattle’s Philharmonia Northwest, the Seattle Modern Orchestra, and many other regional orchestras. His two solo CDs – Edge, on Periplum, and Oo-Ee, on Present Sounds, feature many works commissioned and premiered by Taub by composers including Pēteris Vasks, Sofia Gubaidulina, Wayne Horvitz, Bun-Ching Lam and John Luther Adams. He has also recorded on Innova, CRI, New Albion Tzaddik and many other labels in music ranging from that of John Cage (in a collector’s item vinyl box set of Cage conducting Atlas Eclipticalis) to works by Paul Dresher, Reza Vali, Janice Giteck and many other American and international composers.
Taub has served two terms on the Board of Directors of both the National Flute Association and Chamber Music America, and is currently the President of the Seattle Flute Society. He works closely with the Baltic Arts Council Northwest and is on the Advisory Board of the Seattle Modern Orchestra.
He received a Bachelor of Music from Rutgers University and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His teachers include James Scott, Michel Debost, Samuel Baron, Karl Kraber and David Shostac, plus Marcel Moyse and Robert Aitken whom he considers his mentors.
