Harold Budd

Harold Budd is partly responsible for an album I have listened to just a ridiculous number of times, on the player or in my head. I mean his collaboration with the Cocteau Twins, The Moon and the Melodies.

I was looking for more recent work by him.

I have one album of his own compositions which I used to listen to some years back (I misplaced it!) but the album I mentioned above really married the best parts of his compositional gifts to those of my all-time favorite band--if a band can be a constantly changing ensemble as the Cocteaux were.

I've enjoyed Budd's collaborations with Brian Eno. He must be a dream to work with. Because Eno works with him a lot. They must free each other's mind up.

Who does "Juno" remind me of? Debussy? Satie? Definitely seems something that could have been written by a French composer in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century.

I remember a friend who loved playing Debussy (and hated Cocteau Twins by the way, which horrified me) saying to me one night many years ago while she was doing just that that, "Debussy is pretty much the start of New Age music."



"Transcription by the composer. Mayumi Kameda and Jean-Jacques Balet, piano four hands."

Although, we're obviously miles away from La Mer with Budd's ambient strategies and much more subdued compositions. Debussy's impressionism seems almost shrill in comparison with its dramatic hissy fits. The ocean needs Prozac.

It's interesting to hear this transposed to piano. It's originally scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 cornets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tamtam, glockenspiel, 2 harps and strings.

The cover for the 1905 edition of La Mer was Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa.

While I was listening to the London Symphony Orchestra's recording (Valery Gergiev conducting) of it just now, I was thinking how the opening harp stands in nicely for piano. Funny how those two instruments seem to be mysterious siblings.

When I hear a composition like Budd's "Juno," I think I can still hear how in places Budd sounds like Debussy in this composition-- with a vastly slowed down tempo.

"Juno" seems such a glorious throwback, almost a denial of the present in its intransigent holding to early 20th century ideas.

Wow. Time is a-flyin!

I had never read more than a few words on Budd and I just went to his Wiki entry and learned he is seventy-five years old. I had no idea.

I loved this: "(Budd) was inspired at an early age by the humming tone caused by wind blown across telephone wires."

I can't believe the article does not even mention his collaborations with the Cocteau Twins. The Cocteau Twins' article, however, mentions him. So much for commutative properties.

It does mention his collaborations with ex-Cocteau Twins member Robin Guthrie (one of the two "main" members) including the score they did together for Greg Araki's Mysterious Skin, a film I loved.

And it says he and Guthrie collaborated again as recently as 2007. Let me see if I can find some YouTube clips for that collaboration.

I found this...



This is wonderful. This is somewhat close to The Moon and the Melodies but feels much more terrestrial. I really need to catch up on Guthrie's post-Cocteau composing and pop musickin'. I'm almost completely ignorant of that. It's like I imagine Liz Fraser was the entire band when I really know it was both of them and others making that music. (But Liz's voice...!!)

I love the way this composition gets in and gets out. The ending really feels like the incompleteness that you just know death is.

That article also says Budd is going to be at the Other Minds festival in March of this year.

He apparently had decided to abandon music in a certain relatively recent period but (fortunate for the rest of us!) rethought this decision. He said he had been living in the desert too long, and I suppose one could read this as metaphor, but I think we're meant interpret that term in a very literal sense. The solo album I mentioned above had a strong "desert" theme. And the article says Budd was raised in the Mojave desert.

It's interesting to me that Budd seems to connect to music through landscape--or seascape. With the latter I mean The Cocteau Twins' Moon and the Melodies. Because that album is so sea-inflected. The titles cue you to think that way (ex, "Sea, Swallow Me") and, as with Debussy's most famous work, you can't help but hear the ocean's expanses and the luminous vicissitudes of the waves in that album's pianos.

Off topic, I was reading an article about chromaticism in music and was reading about what became known as the "Tristan Chord" (after Wagner).

This modernizing innovation in music is explained in a documentary narrated by the wonderful Stephen Fry here.

I love it when Fry refers to it as musical "coitus interruptus."

Gay men are always thinking about sex.

Or is that just men?

I think he's scaring the hell out of his interlocutor.

But that looks like a marvelous documentary.

And when they cut to the opera, that's just a gorgeous slice of music.

Note: someone credits the piano. Don't know if it's accurate but a commenter explained of what you're hearing "That's the Liszt transcription."

I'd believe it.

Now, whenever I hear Liszt's name, I think of that funny Raymond Carver poem, "Music."

I love how this poem seems to anticipate internet strategies for the fame game. And--imagine!--this is before 1996.


Music

Franz Liszt eloped with countess Marie D'Agoult,
Who wrote novels. Polite society washed its hands
of him, and his countess-novelist whore.
Liszt gave her three children, and music.
Then went off with Princess Wittgenstein.
Cosima, Liszt's daughter, married
the conductor, Hans von Bülow.
But Richard Wagner stole her. Took her away
to Bayreuth. Where Liszt showed up one morning.
Long white hair flouncing.
Shaking his fist. Music. Music!
Everybody grew more famous.