Harold Budd, Composer of Spaciousness and Relaxed, Dies at 84

John Cage exerted an influence, while considerably less for his audio than for his ideas and his braveness in forging a occupation outdoors of the academy. Performs like “Magnus Colorado” (1969) and the 24-hour “Lirio” (1971) involved reverberant gongs and controlled lighting, fusing Mr. Budd’s compositional thoughts with his pursuits in visual art and set up. For “The Oak of the Golden Dream” (1970), Mr. Budd applied the Buchla Box, an early synthesizer, to pair an unwavering bass drone with an incantatory treble melody, in a fashion reminiscent of Terry Riley’s early operates.

Gripped by a increasing feeling of sterility in the classical avant-garde when educating composition at the California Institute of the Arts from 1970 to 1976, Mr. Budd retreated from community do the job privately, he explored the unambiguous melodic simplicity he identified in medieval and Renaissance tunes.

His composition “Madrigals of the Rose Angel” (1972) marked the start of his experienced model. A recording of the piece arrived at Mr. Eno, whose very own contemplating about songs, listening and atmosphere was coalescing into what he would term “ambient” new music — one particular of lots of labels, together with “New Age,” that Mr. Budd resisted. “I just have totally no fascination in that form of detail,” he explained of these categorizing in a 2014 job interview with The Guardian.

Even with the split with earlier work, some essence of Mr. Budd’s early influences remained. “The Pavilion of Dreams” featured the alto saxophonist Marion Brown, a colleague of John Coltrane. It included the hymn “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord,” in an arrangement inspired by that of the Coltrane acolyte Pharoah Sanders, and “Butterfly Sunday,” a reworking of Coltrane’s “After the Rain.” Other collaborators on the album included the English experimental composers Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars.

From that level, and specifically just after “Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors,” Mr. Budd charted a course that almost never wavered, however accommodated considerable selection and discovery. He performed alone and with groups, recorded with poets and wrote poetry of his own, and manufactured two albums of improvisations with the video clip artist Jane Maru.

Mr. Budd is survived by two sons, Matthew and Terrence, from his to start with marriage, to Paula Katzman and by a different son, Hugo, from his relationship to Ellen Wirth, who died in 2012. Mr. Budd’s brother and stepsister died just before him. He lived in South Pasadena, Calif.