Harold Budd question

[rutgers!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor (Mais, ou sont les neiges d'antan?)]

>Really-From: Paul Kirsch<seismo!sjuvax!kirsch>
>This question should show my lack of musical knowledge--  Who the hell is
>Harold Budd? 

A lack of musical knowledge here is only a problem insofar as
daring to argue with that kid in the IED costume goes-particularly
when the question is politely asked. I'll try to respond in kind:

Harold Budd is a fiftyish composer who lives in Los Angeles. He was
originally trained as a drummer and lured into composing at the urging
of one of his early teachers. He claims to have learned harmony and
orchestration by studying the scores of Bruckner symphonies while in
the Army band. There is very little of his early composition available
(I have heard that there's an old indie album of very early electronic
music-like, say, David Borden's early Mother Mallard stuff-out there,
but I have never heard it). Inspired by Albert Ayler, he embarked on
a kind of minimal (as opposed to Minimalist-a label he picked up later)
and Romantic music for small ensembles. During the time that he was
teaching at Cal Arts in the early 70's, Brian Eno heard a performance
in England of his works written for saxophonist Marion Brown (these
works appear on his Obscure Music/Editions EG album "The Pavillion of
Dreams"), and asked Budd if he would contribute to a series of recordings
of new music that Eno was co-ordinating through his record company
(this was while he was making his own attempts at "pop stardom" and 
playing with 801 and the winkies).

It is largely through the experience of working with Eno and his own
interest in piano improvisation and the acoustic resources of the 
piano that he collaborated with Brian Eno on the second of the "Ambient"
albums, "The Plateaux of Mirror." It is largely through this collaboration
that he became well known outside of academic circles.

He has only rarely played live, and prefers to have his recorded work
thought of as the public document of the private act of playing. There
have been other collaborative recordings made, mostly with Eugene Bowen,
and mostly available on either Cold Blue (who handles Bowen, I think) or
Budd's own "Cantil" label.

His piano music (although it is heavily processed and treated) is 
usually very restrained: slow washes of broken arpeggios married
to some of the harmonic changes that one associates with Coltrane's
long and winding ballads. In many cases, there is only the presence of
several very slow chords repeated in an enormous, wet artificial 
space. If you are familiar with the C Twins' recordings, I find the
recording space quite similar to much of the dense stuff on Victorialand.
His more up-tempo pieces are really improvisations based on long melodic
lines that are half melody-half arpeggiated chords, somewhat like the
piano improvisations of Terry Riley.

His association with the Cocteau Twins seems to have originated with
and interest on their part in doing a cover of one of his compositions,
"Children on the Hill". Instead of that, they wound up collaborating
on an album. Robin Guthrie also mixed one of the songs on Harold Budd'sh
most recent solo release, "Lovely Thunder." 

My impression of him from some phone conversations that will eventually
show up here in the form of an upcoming OPTION interview is that
he is a quiet, thoughtful and articulate man (transcribing the interview
with him is a fascinating exercise. The act of transcription usually
makes it abundantly clear that many people simply don't speak in anything
other than telegraphic bursts of sentence fragments. Budd speaks in
real live sentences and real paragraphs. *That* is a rare trait, I think.

Here is (from memory) a listing of his recorded work:

* The Pavillion of Dreams (Obscure Music/EG)
* Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror (EG, with Eno)
* The Serpent [in Quicksilver] (Cantil, and it's been licensed to someone
else. I do not remember who).
* Cold Blue (a piece w/ Eugene Bowen on a Cold Blue compilation)
* The Pearl (EG, with Eno. My personal favorite)
* Abandoned Cities (Cantil, marketed by JEM. Installation music. w/Bowen)
* The Moon and the Melodies (a collaborative album with the Cocteau Twins)
* Lovely Thunder (EG. Produced by Michael Hoenig).

Ambient 2, The Pearl, and Lovely Thunder are all available on Compact
Disc. The CD of Lovely Thunder contains a non-album cut, and I am told
that Budd appears throughout the uncredited music on Brian Eno's
"Music for Films, Vol. II" that comes in the Eno box. It sure sounds
like it to me. I hope this helps.

Greg
-- 
"They showed themselves to you here not because/this is their sphere, But
as a sign for you/that in the Empyrean their place is lowest./Such signs
are suited to your mind, since from/the senses only can it apprehend/what
then becomes fit for the intellect." Dante, Paradiso (IV,37-42)