RealNewArts Foundation
in association with
The Ruth B. Shannon Center for the Performing Arts
proudly presents
RealNewMusic 2016
An Evening with
Harold Budd
with Bradford Ellis
and featuring the work of visual
artist Jane Maru
Sunday,
August 21, 2016
7:30 p.m. - Tickets $30.00
CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS & MORE INFORMATION
Legendary composer and performer Harold Budd, known as one of the pioneers of ambient music for his solo work and his work with Brian Eno and the Cocteau Twins (among others) will be performing live at the Shannon Center for a rare and special night of music and poetry. This will truly be a night not to be missed.
Photo by Greg Cristman @ gregcphotography.com
Harold Budd’s music eludes classification, though it has been described as “like the Southwest desert landscapes of his youth, possessing a thin veneer of serenity, yet masking a mood that is dark and dangerous.” During the 40 years since Pavilion of Dreams, the first of his three groundbreaking collaborations with Brian Eno, Budd has recorded more than 40 albums, traversing a wide range of colors and sounds, from lush synthesized melodies and haunting string quartets to spare and beautiful compositions defined by his “soft pedal” piano style. www.haroldbudd.com
Bradford Ellis is a composer/arranger/keyboardist/producer who has performed with many avant-garde ensembles, and has orchestrated and performed on numerous motion picture and television soundtracks. Friend Brad Ellis at www.facebook.com/brellis
Jane Maru is a textile artist,
illustrator, and visual artist who has spent many years
exploring her craft in the silent, open spaces of the
Mojave Desert. www.janemaru.com
The Ruth B. Shannon
Center for the Performing Arts
Whittier College, 6760 Painter Ave., Whittier
Box Office: 562.907.4203
Google map to the Shannon Center
Born in Los Angeles, California (1936),
Harold Budd had
music ingrained from childhood, be it the Protestant
hymnals sung in church, the Mariachi music from East LA,
or the strains of the harmonium the he recalled his
mother played so beautifully. Harold was only 13 when
his father passed away, and soon his family fell out of
their comfortable middle class existence. He was sent
him up to the desert to live with friends and relatives
as often as possible, but the reality in Los Angeles was
growing up in a rough neighborhood, and as the oldest
son, being the man of the house. During this time Black
culture had an enormous impact on Harold, especially
jazz music and bebop, and he could be found in his teen
age years playing drums in bars and jazz clubs in South
Central Los Angeles. After being kicked out of Los
Angeles High School, Harold went to work at Northrup,
working a blue collar job to support the family. At 21,
he decided to get himself an education and enrolled at
Los Angeles Community College for a course in music
theory. “From that moment on,” he recalls, “I had an
insatiable appetite. Harmony, counterpoint, Renaissance
music: I really heard it for the first time.”
After a stint in the army where he played drums in an
army band with avant-garde jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler,
Harold studied under Schoenberg protegé Gerald Strang
and received his undergraduate degree from Cal State
Northridge. He then received a scholarship to study
under Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern
California. It was there that he discovered the abstract
expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. These “brilliant
blasts of color that simply engulfed you” held an
enormous significance for Harold, but the ability to
translate such sensations into musical terms still
eluded him.
As Harold recalled, “In the very early '60s, John Cage
had an enormous impact on me -- but I must say more
through his writings and the example of his lifestyle
than through his music. He showed us that it was
possible to be an artist without selling out to the
academy, and to go directly into art itself. That was an
important heroic posture for almost all American artists
at that time.” It was a diverse universe of music that
Harold drew upon in these formative years, and he was
not only influenced by avant-garde artists like Morton
Feldman and Terry Riley, but also by the music of
Pharoah Sanders. Harold remembered that Sander’s music,
“seemed to me to kind of allude to a very undisguised
tonal music. It was exactly what it was. It was that
note at that time and it was the right one. I loved that
idea. To a large extent I confess that I was influenced
by that more than I can really say.”
In 1966, when presenting his ground breaking orchestral
piece "Rothko", he was told that it was rhythmically too
complex and could not be done. Harold proved otherwise
and received his Master’s Degree in musical composition.
Afterward, speaking with Ingolf Dahl about whether he
should continue on for a higher degree, Professor Dahl
told him, “no, go out and compose”. He did, and became a
respected name in the circle of minimalist and
avant-garde composers based in Southern California and
during the late ‘60s.
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).
Harold saw the answer to the problems of "sterile"
avant-garde music in the tight structures of minimalism,
and he started to bring his music back to bare and tonal
essentials. However, the direction he took was different
to other minimalists. Firstly he steered clear of the
'pattern music' of Reich and Glass, and secondly he
became "fascinated by old-fashioned music, like
mediaeval and Renaissance music. I found delights and
wonder in a musical language that was really uncool,
that was really unhip and had nothing to do with
avant-garde, and that was also different from the
starkness of much minimalistic music. When I made my
break from avant-garde in 1970, both psychologically and
aesthetically, I pretty much rejected everything I had
done until then, but didn't quite know which direction
to go in. But once I hit on my interest in older music,
I found a new direction, in which I purposely tried to
create music that was so sweet and pretty and decorative
that it would positively upset and revolt the
avant-garde, whose ugly sounds had by now become a new
orthodoxy. Hard as is it is to imagine now, the
prettiness of my music was very much a political
statement at the time."
Although Harold’s music is intimately associated with
his unique “soft-pedal” style of piano, he did not
actually take up the instrument as a solo artist until
his late 30’s. He rebelled against the conventional
notion that composers should also be keyboardists. When
he finally did teach himself to play piano, the impetus
was pure necessity. "I wrote a piece in 1972 called
Madrigals of the Rose Angel, and it was sent off for a
public performance back East somewhere. I wasn’t there,
but I got the tape and I was absolutely appalled at how
they missed the whole idea. I told myself, ‘This is
never going to happen again. From now on, I take full
charge of any piano playing.’ That settled that.”
Madrigals of the Rose Angel was a gently hypnotic work
for harp, electric piano, celeste, percussion and
lulling, angelic chorus - “my favorite instuments”. It
marked a turning point in his young career, and when it
caught the attention of British producer and musician
Brian Eno, Harold was offered a recording contract with
EG Records, who released his debut album, The Pavilion
of Dreams, in 1978. Just as Rothko had been his ground
breaking piece at the beginning of his musical journey,
The Pavilion of Dreams was what he considers his birth
as a serious artist. Eno inspired Harold with the
attitude of absolute bravery to go in any direction.
In the early eighties, Harold began using the recording
studio as an instrument in his compositions, not merely
as a facility for documenting them. His two
collaborative efforts with Brian Eno Ambient 2: The
Plateaux of Mirror (1980) and with Brian Eno and Daniel
Lanois The Pearl (1984) were landmark albums in the
emerging musical genre of ambient music. Harold himself
has never been comfortable with the description of his
music as ambient, stating that, “it’s meant to mean
something, but is in fact, meaningless. I don’t think
about genres. I don’t think about labels: they don’t
have meanings.” His two self-produced works during this
period The Serpent (in Quicksilver) and Abandoned
Cities, explore darker textures, and show why his music
defies such easy classification. With the steel guitar
of Chas Smith, and the country-western influenced guitar
of Gene Bowen, these two albums perhaps more than any
others evoke memories of the desert and the sounds of
Los Angeles, and the subtle disturbances and disquiet
that lurk beneath. As Michael Padletta of Billboard
Magazine wrote, “Like the Southwest desert landscapes of
his youth, Harold Budd’s music has a thin veneer of
serenity, masking a mood that is dark and dangerous.”
Ever restless and searching for new challenges, Harold
left Los Angeles and lived in England from 1986 to 1991
and recalled in an interview that, “I had a wonderful
life there. I had a British version of a green card, and
I traveled all over the continent and concertized a lot
and had quite a professional life there. I had to get
out of America to get a professional life going where I
could actually make a living.” It was in London that
Harold formed an unlikely collaboration with Robin
Guthrie and the Cocteau Twins with the release of The
Moon and the Melodies (1986). It was Harold’s first
foray into popular music, and though at the time many of
his admirers leveled heavy criticism at it, this album
has grown in stature over the years. It also represented
Harold’s boldness to go in new directions and learn and
experiment with new collaborators.
Harold followed with two acclaimed solo works, Lovely
Thunder (1986), co-produced with Michael Hoenig, and The
White Arcades (1988), produced by Robin Guthrie in
Edinburgh, Scotland. Lovely Thunder grew out of an art
installation for a US sponsored program called New Music
America. Harold’s work entitled Blue Room with Flowers
and a Gong recalled his audio/visual work of the late
1960’s. In Harold’s words it was, “a room full of blue
light, very dark, with a large polished gong hanging
from the ceiling with lights on it and the room full of
big flowers, taller than me and a lovely smell. I liked
Gypsy Violin (the title of the music) so much that I
decided to make an album out of it.”
By the Dawn ‘s Early Light (1991) signaled Harold’s
return to the US, and a departure from studio-produced
albums and return to a more formal mode of composition
focusing on his personal fondness for unusual,
idiosyncratic instrumental combinations (in this case,
harp, pedal steel guitar, electric guitar, and viola)
and short, spoken word poems. With its haunting Western
imagery and lonesome, open sounds, this album also
marked a return to a recurring theme of Harold’s music,
the mystery, the beauty, and the mythology of the
desert. She is a Phantom (1994) continued this return to
ensemble performance and poetry, teaming with Zeitgeist,
an American contemporary ensemble.
Harold followed up with two collaborative efforts that
took his music in entirely new directions. Harold
recorded Through the Hill (1994), with XTC’s Andy
Partridge, an unlikely combination of talents from
opposite ends of the recording spectrum and one of his
most critically and commercially acclaimed collaboration
albums to date. Glyph (1995) with Hector Zazou, the
French techno-rock producer, was described by Harold as
“carving on a large stone with our tools and then
waiting until later to find out what we said.”
With Luxa, (1996), Harold returned to the spaciousness
that characterized 1988’s White Arcades. Despite its
spaciousness, however, Luxa is harsher and starker,
features much more solo piano, and employs more rhythmic
devices. In the words of a reviewer from 1997, “Luxa is
a minor masterpiece that demonstrates that there's still
life in ambient music, and that it's still possible to
make a meditative musical work that's neither New Age
kitsch, nor weighed down by the numbing repetitiveness
and sterile conceptualism that's hampered the minimalist
and ambient genres for so long.”
Harold followed this with an unusual album, Walk Into My
Voice: American Beat Poetry (1988) that consisted of a
selection of poems dominated by the cultural influence
of the American Beat Generation. The 33 brief poems
included in this CD are recited by Harold himself and by
Jessica Karraker, with background music composed by
Harold and Daniel Lentz. His next album The Room (2000)
expanded upon the eponymous song from his 1988 release
The White Arcades. It was, as the Los Angeles Times
reviewed, “A collection of rooms, including a flowered
room and one dedicated to forgotten children; it serves
as a conceptual springboard from which ambient alchemist
Harold Budd creates 13 vignettes of bewitching
subtlety.”
Harold continued to challenge his musical boundaries
with collaborations with punk and new wave pioneer Jah
Wobble with a live performance in Solaris (2002) and
with electronica and downtempo artists Filia Brazilia in
Three White Roses and a Budd (2002). Translucence/Drift
Music (2003) was a collaboration with another English
punk rock / new wave pioneer, John Foxx of Ultravox. La
Bella Vista (2003) is an album of Harold playing
acoustic piano surreptitiously recorded by U2 producer
Daniel Lanois.
Let go by Atlantic records, and feeling distaste for the
music business in America, Harold created what was to be
his “farewell” album, Avalon Sutra (2004). By chance, he
met yet another British new wave pioneer, David Sylvian,
in Los Angeles and agreed to release the new album on
David’s small, independent label, Samadhi Sound.
Considered by some to be Harold’s finest work, Avalon
Sutra showcases his compositional insights by combining
string quartet, woodwinds, and synthesizer with his own
haunting acoustic piano. As Peter Marsh of BBC Music
reviewed:
Whatever the delights of his back catalogue, to my ears
Avalon Sutra is possibly Budd's most consistently
ravishing work. It owes a lot to the largely acoustic
textures of The Pavilion of Dreams, his 1978 debut for
Eno's Obscure label. Influenced equally by the more
meditative moments of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders
as well as minimalist Cage piano works like In a
Landscape, it mapped out an area that he's not often
returned to since.
Augmented by the woodwinds of Phillip Glass collaborator
Jon Gibson and the occasional appearance of a string
quartet, the composer's piano offers gentle, rippling
arpeggios and skeletal, yearning melodies characterised
as much by the space between the notes as the notes
themselves. The four duets with Gibson are tiny gems;
melancholic but never maudlin.
The pieces with string quartet makes me wish Budd had
done more in this vein, or that maybe he'd stick around
and do some more. For the remainder of the record the
piano is left alone, sometimes with the haze of distant
electronic textures. Nothing outstays its welcome;
nothing is out of place.
However, Harold’s “retirement” proved short lived, and
his restless energy over the last decade has included 15
releases, including 12 studio albums. Five of these
albums saw Harold reunite with Robin Guthrie of the
Cocteau Twins, including the soundtracks of two Gregg
Araki films, Mysterious Skin (2005) and the just
released White Bird in a Blizzard (2014). Bandits of
Stature (2012) saw Harold employ a string quartet to
play haunting and soulful pieces written in memoriam for
his late wife, Ellen Wirth. In 2013 Harold finished a
year-long project with the video artist Jane Maru. Once
again he explored new territory by entering the studio
with no preparation, no notes or even ideas and recorded
whatever came up in the particular session. Whatever he
did was mixed and pressed without ever being revisited.
The result is two albums, Jane 1-11 (2013), and Jane
12-21 (2014), that highlight Harold’s improvisational
genius.
Harold’s music continues to influence many generations
of musicians, from U2’s sampling for Cedars of Lebanon
(2009) to an anthology of 13 contemporary ambient
musicians paying homage to Harold in Lost in the Humming
Air (2012). Meanwhile, Harold continues to create and
innovate. His soon to be released book of poetry, Aurora
Tears, will mark his seventh such book with art house
publisher Heavenly Monkey.
Harold lives in Los Angeles, California.