Harold Budd

American musician and avant-garde composer, a modern poet of the piano, he is best known for his ethereal, free-floating keyboard treatments and is considered one of America’s most inventive minimalist composers.

Budd grew up in Victorville, California, interested in music from an early age. At 15, he was an apprentice drummer, and at 21, he enrolled at Los Angeles Community College, studying music theory. He was drafted into the Army where he played drums with an Army band, and it wasn’t until 1966 that he graduated from the University of California with a degree in Musical Composition. Along the way, he discovered the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko, describing them as "brilliant blasts of color that simply engulfed you." Moved by the paintings, Budd’s desire was to translate the sensations he felt into music.

During the late ’60s, other minimalist composers in Southern California grew to respect Budd. He began teaching at the California Institute of Arts in 1970, continuing to compose, and writing "Madrigals of the Rose Angel" in 1972. Unable to play the piano at the time, Budd learned so he could play his own keyboard parts and later he developed a unique soft pedal style. In 1976, he signed a recording contract with EG Records, and released his debut album, The Pavilion of Dreams (1978). He collaborated with Brian Eno in 1980 for one of the landmark albums of the ambient style, Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors. During the ’80s-’90s, he recorded for various record labels, and introduced poetry into his music with By the Dawn’s Early Light (1991). He signed with Atlantic in mid-2000, releasing The Room that year.

By age 36, Budd was married with a family. Budd died on 8 December 2020 at age 84 due to complications of the coronavirus.