UC Santa Cruz

Pushing Towards Zero: Harold Budd, Networks and New Music in Southern California (1964–1991) recovers a history of American experimental music obscured by narratives centered on New York, minimalism, and “ambient” music. Using Harold Budd as its central figure, the dissertation reconstructs a Southern California musical ecology formed through universities, museums, concert series, independent publications, friendships, performance collectives, and recording studios. It argues that Budd’s music emerged not through solitary stylistic development but through the movement of sounds and ideas across institutions, media, and relationships.Budd’s path begins in Los Angeles, where jazz, Hollywood labor, European concert music, and the landscapes of the American West shaped his early listening. His Army years with Albert Ayler, modernist training at San Fernando Valley State College and USC, and encounters with John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown led him toward sparse notation, open form, extended duration, and near-silence. “Pushing towards zero” names this effort to discover how little a composition might do while still transforming perception.However, reduction was not Budd’s endpoint. Within the volatile early culture of CalArts and the networks surrounding independent publications, Monday Evening Concerts, and the Pasadena Art Museum, he redirected experimentalism toward sensuous beauty, tonality, resonance, and harmonic suspension. Barney Childs’s correspondence provided a space in which Budd tested his ideas through friendship, humor, and aesthetic argument. Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney, Daniel Lentz, and the composers gathered in California 99 reveal a dispersed California network organized less by a common style than by collaboration, circulation, and shared resistance to inherited musical authority.The dissertation places Budd’s early-1970s turn toward “pretty” music at the center of this history. In The Peacock Room, The Dragonfly Cymbal, and Madrigals of the Rose Angel, blue light, ornament, floral display, tonal harmony, Pre-Raphaelitism, and “art for art’s sake” became experimental materials. Beauty was not a retreat from experimentalism but a challenge to the critical and institutional tendency to equate the avant-garde with difficulty and the refusal of pleasure.These concerns converge in The Pavilion of Dreams, where older vocal traditions and aestheticist imagery meet the spiritual jazz of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. Through performers such as Marvin Hayes and Marion Brown, Budd’s suspended harmonic world entered into dialogue with Black sacred, modal, and improvisational practices. Budd's mature language did not originate in London. Collaborations with Gavin Bryars and Brian Eno instead translated an already formed California aesthetic into studio composition, transatlantic circulation, and its later reception as “ambient.”Drawing on correspondence, interviews, scores, recordings, teaching materials, concert programs, and institutional archives, this dissertation reframes experimental music as a history of conditions: of places, labor, friendship, mediation, and survival. It presents Budd not as a marginal “minimalist” or an “ambient” precursor, but as a composer through whom Los Angeles becomes audible as a major site of postwar musical experimentation.