Harold Budd-11 cd

Harold Budd (born May 24, 1936) is an American ambient/avant-garde composer and poet. Born in Los Angeles, California, he was raised in the Mojave Desert, and was inspired at an early age by the humming tone caused by wind blown across telephone wires.
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 with a degree in musical composition.
As his career 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". "The Oak of the Golden Dreams" was based on the Balinese "Slendro" scale. 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 Dream, the latter based on the Balinese "slendro" scale which scale I used again 18 years later on The Real Dream Of Sails [from the 1988 CD The White Arcades].
"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." Budd, Harold, excerpt from liner notes for The Pavilion of Dreams, dated Los Angeles, October 1991.