Harold Budd

Harold Budd
Harold Budd in Japan (photo: Masao Nakagami)
Background information
Birth name	Harold Montgomory Budd
Born	(1936-05-24) May 24, 1936 (age 80) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Genres	Ambient, drone, avant-garde, neoclassical
Occupation(s)	Musician, composer, poet, professor
Instruments	Piano, keyboards, guitar
Years active	1962–present
Labels	Opal, Land, Darla, Samadhi, New World, All Saints, EG, 4AD

Harold Montgomory Budd (born May 24, 1936) is an American avant-garde composer and poet. He was born in Los Angeles and raised in the Mojave Desert. He has developed a style of playing piano he terms "soft pedal".

Budd's career as a composer began in 1962. In the following years, he gained a notable reputation in the local avant-garde community. In 1966, he graduated from the University of Southern California (having studied under Ingolf Dahl) with a degree in musical composition. As he progressed, his compositions became increasingly minimalist. Among his more experimental works were two drone music pieces, "Coeur d'Orr" and "The Oak of the Golden Dreams". After composing a long-form gong solo titled "Lirio", he felt he had reached the limits of his experiments in minimalism and the avant-garde. He retired temporarily from composition in 1970 and began a teaching career at the California Institute of the Arts.[1]

"The road from my first colored graph piece in 1962 to my renunciation of composing in 1970 to my resurfacing as a composer in 1972 was a process of trying out an idea and when it was obviously successful abandoning it. The early graph piece was followed by the Rothko orchestra work, the pieces for Source Magazine, the Feldman-derived chamber works, the pieces typed out or written in longhand, the out-and-out conceptual works among other things, and the model drone works (which include the sax and organ "Coeur d'Orr" and "The Oak of the Golden Dreams", the latter based on the Balinese "Slendro" scale which scale I used again 18 years later on "The Real Dream of Sails").

"In 1970 with the "Candy-Apple Revision" (unspecified D-flat major) and "Lirio" (solo gong "for a long duration") I realized I had minimalized myself out of a career. It had taken ten years to reduce my language to zero but I loved the process of seeing it occur and not knowing when the end would come. By then I had opted out of avant-garde music generally; it seemed self-congratulatory and risk-free and my solution as to what to do next was to do nothing, to stop completely."