Children on the Hill

Budd wrote Children on the Hill alone. A version first appeared in November 1980 as his only track on From Brussels With Love, a Les Disques du Crépuscule sampler that also carried The Durutti Column, John Foxx, Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars. The next year it opened the second side of The Serpent (In Quicksilver), the record he produced himself for his Cantil label.

It is a solo piano piece: the right hand carries the melody while the left hand keeps to four notes for most of its length. The composer and critic Kyle Gann noted that the studio version never changes key or tempo, staying in B major around a motive of B, D sharp and E. Kirk McElhearn called it deceptively simple and subtly emotional.

Live

On 9 July 1982 Budd played a far longer version at Navy Pier in Chicago for the New Music America festival. The motive was inverted, the music moved through several closely related keys, the piano ran through a harmonizer, and a long middle section was built from rapid arpeggios. Gann, who worked for the festival, later posted the recording and transcribed that section at as little as a fifth of the speed. Shown the result, Budd said, "I couldn't play that in a thousand years." An excerpt appeared on the 1983 Crépuscule cassette Chicago 82: A Dip in the Lake, and a track on Perhaps, from his 2006 CalArts concert, returns to the piece's melodies.

The upload in the hypersongs web is the 1981 studio album version, posted by Budd's own channel.