May 24, 1936: Harold Budd, Los Angeles
Two appearances at the NMAs, only one with music, both everlasting...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Budd
♪ Chicago 1982
Harold Budd Children on the Hill
Kyle Gann’s archives from the festival have provided this actual performance recording of which I’m most grateful to discover:
I think that one of the most spectacular goals composers can achieve these days is to be at least partly responsible for a music that can change your life. This is occurring anyway, but mostly outside of art music traditions, and I think this is a most wonderful confusion.
- Harold Budd’s program statement
***
The other solo, Harold Budd's Children on the Hill, as performed by the composer, had the effect of a drug-influenced piano improvisation - soft clouds of rippling arpeggios floating over a repetitive series of deliberately banal harmonic progressions.
This is 1980s "head music" for the minimalist cult.
- John Van Rhein, Chicago Tribune 'New Music America Leaves Echoes of Success"
***
5,000 kilometers from noisy Manhattan lies a land of palm trees, orange groves, vineyards and Hollywood. It's California and it's hard to imagine a composer more Californian than Harold Budd. He has lived his entire life in the Los Angeles area. His music is of an immediate and uncomplicated beauty. He is simply trying to please the listeners. Therefore, his music stands in sharp contrast to both the aggressiveness of the new generation and the theorists of the older avant-garde.
In the last few years, Harold Budd has had success with a number of gramophone records: especially those he has released in collaboration with the English composer and producer Brian Eno. At the festival in Chicago, Budd himself performed a piece for solo piano and "harmonizer" with the title Children on the Hill, whose simple and delicious expressions bordered on the naïve. The connection between Harold Budd's music and jazz is immediate, and jazz was also well represented at the New Music America festival.
- Wayne Siegel, “Rapporter: New Music America Festivalen 1982” (original dutch, google translation), DMT Seismograf, 1982
♪
The performance at NMA 1982 Chicago was saved by Other Minds who took the track from a live NPR broadcast hosted by Charles Amirkhanian and Joan La Barbara. It is the first track at the beginning of the first of the three hour broadcast, which you can find here: https://archive.org/details/NMA_1982_07_09
=====================
♪ Los Angeles 1985
Harold Budd Blue Room With Flowers and Gong
Residents - visual art from The Mole Show
Like a number of Californian composers of his generation he has an interest in the more meditative forms of music, in the idea of a controlled musical environment, and in a sense of non-doctrinaire spirituality. Some works from the 1960’s are concerned with the idea of installation, in the visual art sense. Magnus Colorado (1969), for several gongs, asks for a “very soft coloured light” to flood the performance area. Lirio (1971) has the simple notation “under a blue light, roll very lightly on a large gong for a long duration”. Intermission Piece (1968) is a verbal score that sets up conditions for an ambient performance in any intermission (concert, play etc.) in a way not unrelated to Satie’s earliest essays in his musique d’ammeublement (1920). Even Madrigals of the Rose Angel (1972), a later work for female choir, has the note that it should be performed “with dark lighting, maybe blue, preferably from above. It would be nice if the chorus were topless”. To my knowledge this piece still awaits an authentic performance. As late as 1985 he included a piece in the New Music America Festival , Blue Room with Flowers and Gong which continued this concern for a total experience of both music and space. He has often spoken of the impact of the paintings of Mark Rothko on him, and there is a clear connection between these works and minimal or colour-field painters from the 1950’s onwards.
- From Gavin Bryars’ website, “Writings: Harold Budd”
*
What do you have lined up when you return to the States? Will there be another solo album?
Yes. It'll be a solo work on EG. Half of it is already done, and the other half I have to do this summer. I have a lot of work to do on it because I haven't got the foggiest idea what I'm going to do.
The first side is a full twenty-minute piece. It was done in LA, using the Fairlight and Synclavier, and a general array of Oberheim keyboards including the Matrix 12. I use the Matrix in a very unsophisticated fashion, which is to say that although it's multitrack, everything is a live performance. I'm not even using the Synclavier to make the notes proper: it's me, what you hear is the way I'm hitting it.
The piece's working title is Gypsy Violin, because that's the name of one of the factory presets I used on the Synclavier. It's a gypsy violin sound and it's excellent.
I originally did the piece for an art gallery installation in Los Angeles last November. It was called Blue Room With Flowers And Gong - which describes exactly what it is. It's an environment through which you walk, or just take a quick look and walk away and think 'this guy's crazy'. It was originally the length of one side of a C60 cassette, but that version went on a bit - the sustained notes and so on...
- 1986 Harold Budd interview with Dan Goldstein found at https://www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_eamm-jul86.html
♪ in the same exhibit, artefacts from the Mole Show
The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art presents an exhibition of two music installations by The Residents and Harold Budd, in conjunction with the 1985 New Music America Festival. Opening Tuesday, the presentation offers visual and aural access to these composers’ works.
The Residents, a group of San Francisco area composers, will exhibit sets from their Mole Show tour which sought to activate interest in a variety of creative fields: music, theater, literature, painting/sculpture, dance, film/video and computer programming.
The Residents who were invited to open the New Music Festival in Washington in 1983, are publishing their 16th recorded album. The audio part of the installation will feature recorded works never before heard in this country. Harold Budd’s Blue Room with Flowers and Gong is an installation with taped music. Budd, a Los Angeles based composer whose work is often defined as “minimal,” performs it using the piano and electronically altered versions of keyboard sounds. He has held solo concerts in New York, Rome, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Tokyo. The composer/performer has recently been producing his own recordings on the Cantil/Jem label and has collaborated with Brian Eno on two recordings released by EG. Harold Budd will be at LAICA on Saturday at 2 p.m.
- Josine Ianco-Starrels, Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1985
♪
A 2010 interview with Harold Budd from someone named Alejandro at Dublab, posted shortly after Budd passed away from COVID19 in December, 2020, contracted during his stay in a hospital where he was recovering from a stroke, according to the Wikipedia note (from the NY Times obit):
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/17/arts/music/harold-budd-dead-coronavirus.html
Also this Los Angeles Times obit from 2020:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-12-09/harold-budd-brian-eno-ambient-covid-dead
And finally, this new addition to the youtube file marked “Los Angeles 1985 participants”: Harold Budd actually gave this lecture two weeks after the festival ended! It (sometimes) pays off to re-do your search tasks!