Selected reviews:

"Taub's piece...made more of an impact because of its length and distinctive tone row."

(12/10/71, New York Times, Composition for Piano)

"Taub's Quintet is a brisk work for winds, strings and piano which features bright, sharp sonorities and is agreeable to listen to."

(2/12/73, New York Times, Quintet I)

"The performances of the evening were vital from start to finish and showed how effective composers can be at interpreting one another's works."

(4/19/75, New York Times, the Composers Ensemble)

"Mr. Taub's music...is full of energy, noise and quotations, and punctuates the obvious pictorial moments with innocent decisiveness. More power to him if he perseveres in musical theater."

(4/3/76, New York Times, Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction)

"Taub's Quintet bespeaks an authentic musical wit and I was thoroughly charmed by it."

(Perspectives of New Music, Fall-Winter 1975, "Two Conferences: A Report on the ASUC and Theory Meetings in Boston" by William E. Benjamin)

"And there were good moments: the trilled well-wrought opening of Bruce Taub's Band Piece."

(Spring 1983, Newsletter of the International League of Women Composers)

"The conference exploded into existence with an exuberant concert by the LSU Wind Ensemble...The high points were undoubtedly Richard Brooks' Collage and the spectacular Band Piece (Chromatic Fantasy) by Bruce Taub, both of which were enthusiastically received by the large audience. Band Piece, intended as an homage to composer Ross Lee Finney on his seventy-fifth birthday, set up a consistent momentum dramatically terminated by stupendous, reiterated sonorities."

(1982/83, Perspectives of New Music)

"One would not readily expect to encounter poignant irony in the work of an aspiring young mainstream composer...it is also ironically - and astutely - free for the most part from the bald cliches that customarily qualify as jazz influence in concert music."

(MLA Notes, June 1988, Fragile Lady)

"The pun on the word "four" in Taub's title betrays the witty side of a composer whose work has been referred to as "poignant" and "ironic" and who has been able to demonstrate a penchant for theater as well, as in his choice of a George Bernard Shaw play as the basis for his short chamber opera Passion, Poison and Petrifaction or the Fatal Gazogene."

(MLA Notes, March 1990, Variations Four String Quartet)

"...basking in Brahmsian richness. Taub eschews effects; every note takes its place in fervent and disciplined musical discourse."

(Piano Quarterly, May 1992, Preludes)

"Taub is adept at connecting and overlapping fragmented colors and evoking a Bergian sense of cataclysmic drama."

(Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 15, 1996)

"Bruce Taub’s Sonata for solo viola boasts an imaginative use of a head-motive to help unify the work. The work is not easy to play, but is very effectively written for the instrument. The work has an unexpected ending that, like the surprise coda to a good story, we should not give away here."

(MLA Notes, March 1996)

"This work (Lady Mondegreen’s Dances) is music of extraordinary density, throughout its three movements (played attacca), there is rarely a moment where more than one or two instrumental lines are at rest. Within music of such thickness and weight, Taub manages to create effects. Rhythmic motives appear throughout, at times independent, but more often strategically woven into the textures as rhythmic unisons. This, coupled with Taub’s economical use of musical material, makes Lady Mondegreen’s Dances an intriguing work: harmonically and texturally dense (almost relentlessly so), yet treated with a carefully composed classical sense."

(MLA Notes, September 1997)

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