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[Love & Anger]
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HAROLD BUDD INTERVIEW PART 4. COPYRIGHT 1987 GREGORY TAYLOR
____
It's interesting to find that there are two ways of thinking
of the notion of minimalism with respect to your work-one of
them is the sense that your music is about the act of
listening-the act of concentrating and the effect that has
on a piece, and the other is on the actual structure of the
piece rather than its effect on a listener.
Your work strikes me as being located roundly in the center
of those two traditions.
What interests me though is the question of "why" is that
listener engaged, because I certainly am myself-in the act
of making it, I mean. It isn't a question that I'm willing
or able to answer, but I know its there. As I say, you
involve yourself with the act of taking something fundamen-
tally perfect as it is-It's lovely. You don't have to touch
it. Leave it alone. Nonetheless, if you don't just leave
it alone, what version of life is there for the next few
minutes? What is going to happen?
That strikes me as a classically Romantic notion.
I'm sure it is, and that's all right with me.
If I'm reacting strontly to that term it's probably more a
case of the Romantic notion of the composer as a god-like
being, alienated by the weight of vision and endowed with
genius.
Oh, that. Well, think of it in terms of a respect for order
and a respect for the idea of beauty. can you go along with
that?
Yes, I guess so. Speaking of beauty, there is another issue
that I think we need to talk about here-your status and
identification with "New Age" music. You'll be pleased to
know that you've wound up in the New Music bins at the local
store rather than the New Age rack.
I'm not sure which is worse, really (laughter).
Well, okay-where do you place yourself? You've said you came
out of a tradition composed of rugged individuals....what
John Cage has referred to as "troubadors"-a repertoire of
work that's uniquely identified with you that only you do.
Well, it hasn't been that way all along in terms of being
labelled: I've been called a New Age composer, a chance com-
poser, an experimental composer, I was a minimalist for a
while, I was an avant-garde composer-everyone was an avant-
garde composer, you know-hen I was a New Wave composer. I
don't keep up on it these days. I've probably railed on at
too great a length about New Age music, however-I think that
in the end, listeners should be able to listen to whatever
they damn well want to listen to-since it allows for the
possibility that I might be one of those people that they do
listen to. That's a consequence of access, and we simply
have to learn to live with it. Just for my own purposes,
the so-called "New Age phenomenon" is and will be just a
passing fancy. That temporary fashionability of it is just
not relevant to any of my concerns.
But the problem is that you must realize that-since, as
you've said, finished work has a kind of life of its own.
Your own work -however you conceive of it and work hard at
getting it right-is potentially being taken by persons whose
sole purpose is creating a kind of environment devoid of
challenge and cleansed of the potential for the experience
of anything other than beauty in the most mundane and insi-
pid sense.
Yes, that's true, of course. There is little that I can do
about that. It is a consequence of making art. I you can-
not live with the fact that that's an uncontrollzble issue,
you've got no business out there putting recordings out.
But at the same time, it is very difficult for me to come to
grips with the idea of making music that is meant to be
ignorable; the idea of concentration and focus is absolutely
essential to what I'm doing. The choice to make music
ignorable-to make it just a part of the landscape-is a
choice that the listener makes, not me.
Perhaps the difference for the New Age ethos springs from
the idea that the world is a bewildering place and the
proper response to that overwhelming amount of informational
input that you alluded to yourself a little earlier is to
create a kind of environment that insulates you; it's reduc-
tive in the same way that the Industrial aesthetic is when
it makes the flat statement that beauty is neither accept-
able or possible as a constituent part of music.
That goes against every fibre of my being. It is a kind of
idea that runs counter to almost every single notion of what
it means to be a person in our time. The urge to pare
things down solves nothing in that way. It is totally
irresponsible.
In light of that, is the experience of beauty possible for
you? Soothing?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that idea, but the
suggestion in that line of thinking is that art has a func-
tion. Art is completely ineffecient as a problem-solving
medium, and there is-in and of itself-nothing wrong with
using it as a form of escape, if that is a choice that you
make. But it is not intended for that alone, and to narrow
things down to any one thing is, I think, cheapening to all
the other parts of it-which are just as valuable. Narrowing
it down is just farting in a hurricane.
Given the fact that as an artist, you're committed to a life
of producing things that by definition are beyond your con-
trol, what can you do about that tendency to reduce. Are
you left with nothing to do about the whole issue? That
seems pretty unsatifsying....spending your life making
recorded objects that people spend a lot of their lives
willfully misinterpreting-if you can even talk about an
interpretation being something that you somehow own.
I don't really think that they really are misinterpreted in
the final analysis, Greg; just the opposite. For example,
when a stranger comes up to me and says, "You know, thus-
and-such really did it to me. It was just, that was...
blah blah, stroke stroke, flatter flatter. " While that is
certainly very nice to hear-human beings do like to be flat-
tered and all that-I have a theory which is unprovable, of
course, that when they say "That moved me," they are talk-
ing about precisely the same thing that I felt when I did
it-stripped of all the extraneous chatter and stroke.
It is rather as if there were a way to prove that you and
I agreed on what we thought the color red was. If you were
suddenly and miraculously transferred into my body, you
would be totally unsurprised by the sight of red-that is
what I think happens. And so I think that that person and I
are talking about precisely the same thing-however imper-
fectly. It otherwise inexpressible without that particular
medium of communication.
That particular belief on your part is also an act of faith,
isn't it?
Absolutely. Of course.
It would be nice to have that sort of faith in the transca-
tions of art. I am not certain that I do.
Well, that kind of faith gets bruised and shattered all the
time. Of course, putting it in these terms in an interview
situation could always get a reader off think that the whole
business takes on a kind of religious aura. That's not the
case at all. I am a thoroughly secular person. Basically,
that is the best sort of language for this fragile set of
relationships.
Why apologize for it, though? I think that in this century,
the urge to believe and the urge to faith have, to some
extent, located themselves in the minds of many people as
having everything to do with the experience of art and the
experience of beauty rather than religious impulses.
That's fine with me, as long as the New Agers don't usurp
that whole idea and assume that this notion of faith is
strictly some kind of mystical or religious thing, which I
think that they're occasionally trying to do. That offends
me very much-it's that same urge to reduce things again.
Given the tremendous success of New Age Music and New Age
aesthetics-however fuzzily they're articulated-that's going
to be a hard idea to do battle with.
Yeah. I thought for a while that it was going to be a hell
of a problem. It seems more likely that it's going to
self-destruct instead. It may not be able to sustain the
weight of its own pretensions for very long. It may cer-
tainly continue to be immensely commercially successful, but
I don't think that the other mystical baggage is going to
fly as well as it has. Or it won't be able to stand the
kind of modification that wider acceptance may require.
Of course, if you want to look on the bright side, it may
be that a possible outcome of the destruction of the whole
New Age concensus may bring about the emergence of some
respect for people who operate outside of the co-optible
mainstream. Something like what one sees with Minimalism as
it currently stands; there's a sort of "core" of Minimalist
activity producing works for the traditional scale that High
Culture uses-Reich, Glass and Adams writing for large sym-
phonic ensembles, and then this other school of peoplelike
Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, Piero Milesi, David Borden and
others-who have retained their intimate sense of scale.
Very, very English.
There's a kind of individuation that lends their work a kind
of integrity.
Yes, you've said a mouthful, and it's my hope that I wind up
in that particular category. The integrity of all this is
something that I really care about.