Harold Budd
She Is a Phantom
NA066
Harold Budd with Zeitgeist
One shatters glass in a vacuum, then finds the art part among the shards.
—Harold Budd
With this work, composed for Zeitgeist, plus the release of "By the Dawn's Early Light" in 1991, I returned to composing music for ensembles. For a decade I made mostly solo albums, sometimes collaborating with other artists, but I found that I was too often not interested in making a statement as much as I was interested in just making an album. This seemed pointless to me; I changed.
I became very attracted to the "suite structure" of Sandro Chia and others (and earlier in Mantegna and Barnett Newman, for example) and saw it as a way of making composition a process of literary discovery as opposed to searching for titles after the fact. (I first used this in 1988 with "The White Arcades".) Thus, for this work, I invented—conjured—at least two dozen "titles", more accurately called fantasies, observations, remembrances, whatever. I selected seventeen and placed them in a sequence that seemed absolutely right to me, that is, charged with arcane connections. The process of composing the music was in fact a process of discovery as I wound my way through maze of cross-references which only made themselves apparent in the process of confronting the hidden agenda in each work, in its placement. A Briefly Glanced Smile seems a recurring motive; number 13 is numbers 6 and 7 played simultaneously, a fact I didn't realize until well after the fact.
Track List
1. Breathless… I 1:39
2. Pantomime… 2:56
3. The false attribution… 1:37
4. Nearly awakened… 6:22
5. Tiny hands, big ideas. 2:19
6. Emboldened/My dreams perish. 2:21
7. A lazy smile… 2:02
8. I blink and she's gone. 2:12
9. We step across… 0:45
10. Like perfume… 3:27
11. Handsome. The spineless… 2:44
12. Laurel. 2:16
13. She's by the window. 2:23
14. Angels alight… 2:38
15. She has the glassy… 3:01
16. Breathless… II 1:22
17. And then I alone am alone. 4:41
18. IN DELIUS' SLEEP 4:42
Total: 47:37
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