Harold Budd - Education and Academic Career

Education and Academic Career

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 minimal. 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.

"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."

"I resurfaced as an artist in 1972 with "Madrigals of the Rose Angel", the first of what would be a cycle of works under the collective title The Pavilion of Dreams. Madrigals refused to accommodate or even acknowledge any issues in new music. The entire aesthetic was an existential prettiness; not the Platonic "to Kalon", but simply pretty: mindless, shallow and utterly devastating. Female chorus, harp and percussion seemed like a beautiful start. Its first performance was at a Franciscan church in California conducted by Daniel Lentz."