Craig Taborn
Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms (2023)*, an evening-length piece for flute, clarinet, cello, piano, and electronics
Density 2036: part ix
Premiered May 24, 2023 @ The Kitchen featuring performers Joshua Rubin (clarinets), Susie Ibarra (percussion), Craig Taborn (piano, keyboard, electronics), and Levy Lorenzo (sound design)
*Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University.
Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms for flute, clarinet, cello, piano, and electronics
Density 2036: part ix (2023)
The title and initial idea for this piece came from a dream of wandering through some kind of forest or garden and encountering foliage/plants that responded to the proximity of my body- awakening, blossoming, and scenting as I drew near and then continuing to grow and change as I moved on. It was a simple and pleasant dream, but as I woke, I could not escape some sense that in our waking human interactions, we work somewhat in this way - awakening and inspiring others in our environment with our proximity and presence. This piece was initiated from the idea of a composition where the performers' interactions condition in a substantive way how the work unfolds.
Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms is a concert-length work for solo flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, and quadrophonic electronics. The performers are positioned in different areas of the performance space. The flute soloist will move physically amongst the other musicians while performing composed and improvised material, initiating various pre-composed duets and ensemble movements, and defining the performance sequence. The ensemble performers will structure the composition and provide the impetus for how the piece unfolds. Improvisation with elements of the composed materials and electronic environments is designed to be interwoven at the soloist's liberty, allowing for many possible sequences/shapes for the piece. The musicians can thus realize each performance within a variety of durations and contexts and also with a variety of ensemble sizes. Ideally, every version will differ while retaining the piece's unique compositional identity.
This piece was made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation.
"...Chase’s willingness to give a composers an entire hour also paid dramatically satisfying dividends in the premiere of the improvising pianist and composer Craig Taborn’s “Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms” at the Kitchen. It was one of the best shows I’ve experienced this season." -Seth Colter Walls, The New York Times
Written by Thomas May
for the 79th Ojai Music Festival, June 2025
Garden of Healing
As an outside-the-box composer-performer and musical thinker, Craig Taborn was bound to come up on Claire Chase’s radar. Always on the lookout for visionary collaborators for her ongoing new-music initiative Density 2036, Chase found in Taborn an ideal partner for its ninth annual commission. Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms celebrates the boundary-defying imagination and spirit of improvisational co-creation that align perfectly with the ethos of the Density project.
The Minneapolis-born, Brooklyn-based Taborn moves fluently across jazz, electronic, experimental, and art-pop contexts. Acclaimed for both his solo and ensemble work, he is equally at home as a pianist and as an electronic musician – he plays both roles in Busy Griefs – crafting immersive soundscapes and expanding the dimensions of improvisation across formats.
The imaginative seed for Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms was planted by a dream. “I was inspired by a weird, fantastical dream of Claire moving through some kind of garden,” recalls Taborn. “Just as she approached each of the plants and flowers it contained, they opened up, and there was a sense of a conversation happening.” That vision evolved into a performance concept in which Chase, playing a family of flutes (from piccolo to her contrabass flute, nicknamed “Bertha”), initiating musical dialogues as she physically and musically interacts with each of the three other performers
stationed around her. Upon her prompting, “the flower opens up.”
Conceived as “a flute protagonist piece,” Busy Griefs unfolds as a series of through-composed solos and duos that are radically different in mood and material. The duet with Susie Ibarra’s array of percussion, for example, develops into a microcosm of its own. The interactions expand to include several ensemble pieces as well. Bridging these sections are improvised extrapolations on the pre-composed material, for which the musicians draw from a palette of improvisational gestures that serve as a kind of “kit” to build the piece.
The musical architecture – or narrative – is similarly aleatory and modular rather than predetermined. Each of Chase’s interactions is triggered by how she responds to the continually changing sonic environment. Another layer of interaction is the one between acoustic and electronic sounds, including live processing of the former, which Taborn performs from his position at the keyboard. This further intensifies the sense of aural proximity and interaction that is central to the piece.
Alongside his image of a musical kit, Taborn likens the structure to the unpredictable interactions of a game: the path traced by Busy Griefs differs with each iteration. “I’m an improviser at heart and don’t cling to the authorial position too tightly,” he says. (Ojai audiences have an opportunity to compare and contrast the experience, with
performances on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon.)
While Taborn had no specific narrative in mind, he points out that the poetic title reflects the emotional undercurrents at play. The dream that initially prompted the work – a source of inspiration he says is not usually part of his process – was unusually vivid and involved “some sense of grief work. When each flower was approached and opened,
there was an element of healing and love. It’s not a piece about grief but a piece about surmounting grief.”
More than a fixed composition, Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms is a living framework that invites transformation, presence, and unpredictability. “There is no ultimate, final realized version… it’s supposed to be performed and continually worked with,” says Taborn. The musical process of improvisation, movement, and interaction becomes a metaphor for this process of healing. “The openness of encountering an experience musically always feels that way for me,” he adds. “Each performance is a working through of something towards some kind of healing, in more abstract ways.”
Born in Minneapolis, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over twenty-five years. He has experience composing for and performing in a wide variety of situations, including jazz, new music, electronic, rock, noise, and avant-garde contexts.
He has played and recorded with many luminaries in the fields of jazz, improvised, new music, and electronic music, including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Lester Bowie, Dave Holland, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Steve Coleman, David Torn, Chris Potter, William Parker, Vijay Iyer, Kris Davis, Nicole Mitchell, Susie Ibarra, Ikue Mori, Carl Craig, Dave Douglas, Meat Beat Manifesto, Dan Weiss, Chris Lightcap, Gerald Cleaver, and Rudresh Mahanthappa.
He is currently occupied creating and performing music for solo piano performance (Avenging Angel and the newly released Shadow Plays), piano trio (Craig Taborn Trio), an electronic project (Junk Magic), the Daylight Ghosts quartet, a piano/drums/electronics duo with Dave King (Heroic Enthusiasts), and a new trio with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith; he has also done piano duo collaborations with Vijay Iyer (The Transitory Poems), Kris Davis (Octopus), and Cory Smythe. In addition, he makes music as a member of the instrumental electronic art-pop group Golden Valley Is Now and performs frequently on solo electronics.