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HAROLD BUDD INTERVIEW PART 5. COPYRIGHT 1987 GREGORY TAYLOR
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Great next question: What are you working on now? A large
opera to be performed in Stuttgart, perhaps?
To be honest, I'm not working on anything.
But I can't put that in print, Harold. You'll look like an
indolent lout.
But it is really true. Not because I can't or don't want
to, but there just isn't anything there right now.
I guess that could be in part due to the fact that since
your work is primarily distributed in recorded form, it must
occur in widely space and discrete intervals. In between
that time, you do something else. You do research.
It's not like I'm sitting around on my sofa collecting roy-
alties or anything like that. What I'm looking for is some-
thing that is really going to ring my bell and then sit down
and get to it. Of course, it's frightening to think that
you have to begin again and find whatever it is, and it's
always possible that you may get ready to work and then
realize that someone doesn't want you to.
Well, we go back to your description of Albert Ayler putting
all of himself out on the line when he gets up to play.
Writers talk about that same thing as well. It just happens
that your version of it is more solitary than it is for most
performers. You've said before that the business of
developing a style is the matter of taking what it is that
you do and doing it to the exclusion of all else. The
danger is that no one will want what you do.
It is like handwriting in that way. Very personal.
How did you embark on your most recent bit of collaboration
with the Cocteau Twins?
It was the easiest thing in the world. They called me up
and asked me if I wanted to, and I said that I did. They
had initially expressed some interest in covering "Children
on the Hill" and adding a vocal track to it. I had heard
that they were doing to do that and I thought, "God, what a
wonderful idea."In fact that didn't happen-I didn't know
that we weren't going to do that until later on. The plan
to cover "Children" didn't actually not happen until after
I'd gotten together with them. The project changed and we
changed our minds about things as we worked. But as a
result of these chemical forces beyond my control, the Twins
called me up and asked me if I wanted to work with them. I
said that I'd be thrilled to work with them, and that I was
once of the world's greatest living fans of their work and
they said that they were big fans of what I was doing and so
on. So I just said, "Yes. You just tell me when you're
ready to start work and we'll get right to it." And the
whole project was on in just a couple of months. And it was
easy.
What really strikes me about "The Moon and the Melodies" is
the mixture of your piano with Liz Fraser's voice. There's
really been nothing like that in your work since the days of
the "Rosetti Noise" recordings (on the Obscure recording
"The Pavilion of Dreams").
Yes, that's right. That human voice soaring overhead. Oh
yes, and Liz Fraser does have a marvelous voice. It was a
pleasure to work with her.
In addition to these records, there is also some backlog of
music that you've got on hand for use with films as well, as
I understand.
Well, that is the case, but the fact of the matter is that
it really isn't used very much at present.
That really surprises me, in that it seems that the non-
editorial quality of the recordings that you make would
seems to lend it self quite well to inclusion in film.
Well, the thing is that fim music tends to be a closed shop.
Unless that's your particular area of specialization in this
world, it's really difficult to do a lot of it and be
involved in producing film music. What really happens, how-
ever, is that music is used off of the records that I pro-
duce a lot. Especially for me, this means that it shows up
a lot in Australia and Japan. What's interesting about all
this is to see where those of us at Opal do end up; for John
Hassel, it's French Television. Rodelius shows up in Ger-
many a lot. I just don't know why it doesn't occur to any-
one to just hire the originals.
I suppose that the reason is that a producer might be much
more willing to go with a known quantity than to take the
risk of having new work done. The recorded work is already
a kind of familiar object.
I suppose so. They already hear something that they think
is going to work, and they don't have to take a gamble on
something they don't know about.
But that's so ironic when one considers that a large number
of filmmakers expose themselves to precisely that sort of
risk of unpredictability in the course of their own work all
the time? Why should their courage fail them at such an
arbitrary moment?
But that is the way that it works, though. The business of
making films is even more collaborative and democratic than
making a recording. You simply cannot do that alone. The
cinematographer in most cases has absolutely nothing to say
about anything other than the cinematography, and so on.
The choice of music is usually the producer or the company
or some combination of the two, and what music is used and
where it is used is very often not an artistic decision at
all. You may come away from the shock of recognition and
seeing your work recontextualized on film feeling either
like it's ingenuous and charming or feeling a little bit
like you've been mugged.
But here we are again, back at this idea that art has a life
of its own once it's finished and goes out into the world,
aren't we?
Yes, I guess we are. Well, I guess that that must be an
important idea if we keep stumbling over it as much as we
do, mustn't it?