[Message Prev]
[Message Next]
[Date Index]
[Thread Prev]
[Thread Next]
[Thread Index]
[Love & Anger]
[Gaffaweb]
HAROLD BUDD INTERVIEW PART 2. COPYRIGHT 1987 GREGORY TAYLOR ____ It seems to me that the whole Postmodern notion that culture presents us with options in the absence of editorializing- that that we're expected to choose among-is at work there. On one hand, that is wonderful. On the other hand, one longs sometimes for easy guidance. -even something to rebel against. But that is a kind of focus itself.... Yes. When I was coming of age, there was so much to dislike that once you found some kind of art scene that just flew in the face of all received convention, you could just fall in love with it. It was all a kind of secret information-and it may not be quite so simple as all that now. It was espe- cially secret information for me, growing up in Los Angeles and California-which still in some ways remains a very small and parochial town-particularly in regard to New Music. It's difficult to imagine that being true now. I can assure you that there's not been a whole helluva lot of change. Well, I'm going to back up on that a little bit. There's a whole lot of people here doing some very interest- ing work-but this is still a dreadful place to be a modern artist, I must say-unless you're a painter. It is possible that-with all its faults-the system whereby one lives and works in New York or noplace or commutes has not been fully supplanted by the kind of fragmentation and regionalism that you've implied in your discussion of the radical shift in access to information. I see how you could mean that and be right, but regionalism is from now on impossible. Forever. There is just too much information available to maintain the kind of isolation that regionalism needs. There is absolutely no hiding from any- thing that's happening. Regionalism at one time was a kind of muscular way of citing your own independence from a scene that was happening somewhere else. I don't really see how that can occur anymore, since even self-imposed isolation is almost impossible. That brings us rather neatly around to the notion of educa- tion. Back when "The Pavilion of Dreams" was first released, you were a teacher at Cal Arts. Could you talk about teaching a little bit? I was there from 70 until 76. Look, it's very simple. I really didn't teach. It was more that my students hung out with me. In the sense of the Medieval notion of education as a kind of apprenticeship, that's not such an unusual idea.... Yes, I see what you're saying. The difference in this case is that I didn't lay down any laws about what the truth of the matter was. My students came to me-since everybody had a choice, those people came to me because I was associated with a certain kind of music and a certain kind of attitude to working, as opposed to other members of the faculty or other faculty at other schools. It's that issue of access again. Yes, exactly. I guess there is a kind of collaboration in the process of one's education as well. Oh yes. That's true with the act of listening as a way to learn as well. The thing is that I never felt the urge to lay any kind of heavy aesthetic trip on my students. I don't know how to put it, exactly-there wasn't any kind of convincing about the matter. It was "I'm delighted to see you. I think that you're really going to make some wonder- ful music here," and-I didn't exactly say this explicitly- "If you really want to get associated with what I'm doing, I'm sorry. You're not going to learn very much about Webern or Schoenberg." I always figured that I had the attitude-and it was an attitude that I always tried to convince my stu- dents to adopt if they would, please-that what they were really doing was bringing what they were trying to work through-trying to look at things, trying to feel things, seeing how they go-all kinds of very complex issues-and tak- ing these things to someone who was by default older and just more experienced. I always thought that that was really what the proper role of a teacher should be. I didn't think that a teacher should give lessons or tell what should be done, or anything of that nature-just simply be present to bounce ideas off of, while being a little bit older. It sounds as if you might have been trying to recapitulate the experience of your own education. No, not really. I had already left all of that entire scene. I had completely cut myself off from that. My teacher was very different than I was. He was also very good and I learned a tremendous amount from him. I learned harmony and traditional counterpoint just about as well as could be learned. At a certain point that just became irrelevant for me. That doesn't mean that he was irrelevant in any way. When I decided to become a composer myself, none of my reasons for doing that had anything to do with what I had learned. It is like having had a very nice Math teacher when you're a kid and then becoming a chemist instead. You take a lot of that basic information for granted. The other thing about being a teacher is that you're just constantly bombarded by ideas from people who are really smart-your students. All of my students are now the age that I was then. I look at what they're doing, and some of them are really making their own mark-doing music that is often radically different than my work: Peter Gar- land, Eugene Bowen, Michael Byron, Chas Smith, Michael Fink, Michael Bennett. But the whole idea was that we had a com- mon attitude, and I'm sure that's the only reason that they tolerated me for all that time: The notion that everything that has happened in the past doesn't make a bit of differ- ence. I said, "I'm not going to punish you for not learning the past; let's start at square one and see where we're going to go and-all things going well-please come up with a kind of music that's going to change your life. Do some- thing. Stun me." What have you done since that time, then? I've done just about everything but teach. Luckily, I was in a kind of college (Cal Arts) where when you were hired, you were expected to be a teacher and an artist-to work. But once that was over, I thought that the art part was of paramount importance to me. I was really without a plan, except to follow the stalk-the one that smells most delicious-and you go in that direction. That was ten years ago. You have been really fortunate to be able to pursue that. Certainly, Not everyone has the chance to do that. I assure you that I didn't have a plan or a goal for this. What I really wanted to do was to do something that I really believed in that I wouldn't have to be embarrassed about later on. We've talked about collaborating with other musicians and the exchange of ideas with one's students. How does it feel to collaborate with a producer? You seem to feel very strongly about the notion of getting a piece of recorded work perfect. You've produced a fair amount of your own work in addition to working with Brian Eno. "Lovely Thunder" strikes me as an unusual recording, and I'm inclined to see some of that sense of difference as being tied to Michael Hoenig's role as producer. Some of the work that Michael Hoenig did in Koyaanisqatsi strikes me as hav- ing the same kind of dense, theatrical space in it that I associate with your collaborations with Brian Eno. What sort of relationship do you have with Michael Hoenig and with his own work as a musician? First of all, Michael is a friend of mine, and we get along really well as persons. He has a fabulaous studio in the little Tokyo section of Los Angeles where we worked on much of "Lovely Thunder". In addition, he is an absolutely bril- liant engineer, and he wound up doing a large amount of the work that I am simply not capable of doing on my own. He discovered a lot if ideas-maybe it would be more to the point to say that he made it possible from his technologi- cal vantage point for me to discover a lot of things that I couldn't have predicted would come up. By definition, then, that's quite a successful collaboration from your point of view. Very much so. I must say, I've been extraordinarily lucky all along the line. Everyone I've worked with has turned out to be a great friend and they've always been in places where something good has come out of working with them. One of the things that I think I hear in "Lovely Thunder" that strikes me as unusual in terms of your other work derives from hearing what I've come to associate with your way of working done with a very different-. I know what you're about to say, and I completely agree with you.... I think that I hear the music that you've worked on for some time mapped onto a very different set of electronic timbres. Yeah, that's it all right. I think that "Lovely Thunder" is a good deal more confrontational-is that the right word? Well, it is an album that someone who knows your work could potentially dislike, either for being so spare, for sounding so different, or for being so dissonant. For you, that's as confrontational as you get. Outside of "Lovely Thunder" and working with the Cocteau Twins, it has been two years since my last recording, Aban- doned Cities. There is also "The Pearl"-which I knew then and know now, is the end of that entire world. Eno and I are never going to do another piano album together. We have already done it. I like the ethos of "Lovely Thunder", where it isn't charming or necessarily seductive.