As the final sounds echoed in the hall, Borden listened to it fade with mixed emotions. He later reflected, “When I played the last note in that second concert, I thought, well, I’ll miss this, but I’m glad it’s over now finally . . . I had some of the greatest times of my life.”
It was November 8, 2019, and the end of the concert marked not only the fiftieth anniversary of Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company but also the grand finale of Borden’s lifetime career as a performer. Although he plans to continue composing and playing in the years to come, the November concert was Borden’s final performance.
Sitting down with David Borden over blueberry muffins and tea was more than just an ordinary interview. In two hours of conversation with Borden, I still felt as if I had glimpsed only a small piece of a much larger picture—how can you talk about the culmination of a life’s work in so little time?
Fifty years ago, David Borden assembled the world’s first Moog synthesizer ensemble, Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, which began in Ithaca and eventually reached international recognition. The Moog, an analog synthesizer, was originally manufactured locally in Trumansburg, New York, and was recently celebrated at a Cornell exhibit. Mother Mallard began by playing the music of Philip Glass, John Cage, and other composers, but eventually turned to original music composed by Borden himself.
Borden’s greatest work, The Continuing Story of Counterpoint, is a twelve-part cycle of pieces for synthesizer, acoustic instruments, and voice, written between 1976 and 1987. The segments of Counterpoint performed at the November concert featured new faces as well as original members of Mother Mallard, including Borden himself. Attending the performance was an incredible experience, both to hear Borden’s music for the first time, and to witness the historic final concert of a group that has made its impact in the Ithaca area and far beyond. The music itself was strikingly complex in its simplicity, featuring a recurring theme that appears in each of the parts. When the music began, the hall was instantly filled with a wall of sound. There was no introduction or preparation; it simply began. The rhythmic pattern, a constantly changing and alternating sequence of notes, created a colorful and ambient atmosphere. In some ways, Counterpoint could be called minimalistic due to its use of a continuous pattern and style that remains largely the same throughout. But interwoven deep within the composition itself, the piece’s use of harmony and melody is just as complex as the counterpoint of J.S. Bach and Johann Joseph Fux, whom Borden draws much of his inspiration from.
As the grand finale of a long career, the November concert was in many ways a celebration of all that Borden has worked towards since he first laid his fingers on the keyboard at age five. Standing on the other side of it all, Borden reflected on his early years as a musician.
Growing up with parents who never attended college, Borden’s apparent talent for music was considered a chance for a real career. Borden recalled, “Growing up in an era when no one has a profession and you have a chance to be a professional musician . . . since I was good at this, this was the first thing [my parents] wanted me to do.” He eventually found his way to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he discovered numerous opportunities for composition, including writing for Eastman’s chamber orchestra. It was there that he met Howard Hansen. As a director, a conductor, and somewhat of a mentor figure, he offered Borden an outstretched hand, including a bit of help with a bad-tempered dean.
Building upon his experiences playing piano in high school bands and jazz ensembles as well as learning composition and music theory at Eastman, Borden went on to create an ensemble of his own. Mother Mallard was born at the dawn of the Moog, before the synthesiser had been widely adopted. Borden recalled having to teach early band members how to program the Moogs, since they had come from many different backgrounds and had never used them before. The year was 1969, and it was a time before computers existed. Earthquack Records, their newly-established record company, was in its earliest phase.
During the “first band,” Mother Mallard was forced to bring their entire sound system to each performance using their own vehicles as transport. Mother Mallard traveled to Buffalo, New York City, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts—a wide range of locations, but not farther than the East Coast. It wasn’t until the “second band” that they went on to the Midwest, Canada, and Europe. With brand new members, this second band included wind instruments and David’s son Gabriel on the electric guitar.
Compared with the music of the time, Mother Mallard was the only band using exclusively Moogs in original music. The Moogs that the members played were monophonic, meaning they could only play a single note at the time. Unable to play chords, each instrument in the ensemble played single lines like individual voices. Each player used one hand to play and the other hand to modify the sound of the instrument using cables and knobs. For Borden, this limitation became an opportunity to weave the individual parts into a complex counterpoint.
Besides counterpoint, Borden was greatly influenced by inventor and visionary Buckminster Fuller, particularly his concept of synergy, which states that a part taken from a whole system cannot be used to foresee the whole. As Borden explained, “If you take a whole, any kind of whole system, like a grasshopper . . . and then you take a part of it out. And if you take a seat from an airplane and put it there, it doesn’t tell you anything else. You can’t build an airplane because you’ve seen this seat from it. Or you can’t make a grasshopper because you’ve seen one of its legs.”
Borden said that he thinks of his music in this way as well. Counterpoint, if dissected to reveal a single part, would sound nothing like the entire piece itself. In fact, Borden noted that performers must ignore their own part and instead listen only to the whole, or else the piece would be impossible to play. As a continuous wall of sixteenth notes without meter or barlines, performers playing Counterpoint must have a strong sense of rhythm as well as the ability to listen—or else the performer would almost certainly get lost. For some band members, even accomplished pianists, this task would often prove to be extremely difficult.
Even as a member of the audience, it was difficult to pick apart individual parts from the whole; the sounds are experienced as a wave. Listening to The Continuing Story of Counterpoint at Barnes Hall, the parts synchronized together like carefully-oiled gears and created something greater than the parts themselves. All who attended the concert knew that they had witnessed the work of a lifetime, the grand finale of a lifetime career. As the final note echoed out in Barnes Hall, in the moment of silence before the applause, I and all who had attended the concert felt the same bittersweet joy as the composer.
Recommended Listening by David Borden
The Continuing Story of Counterpoint
12 Preludes and Fugues for Solo Piano
12 Preludes and Fugues for 2 Pianos
Enfield in Winter
Heaven-Kept Soul
Cayuga Night Music
Smart Hubris K216.01 Violin Solo & Synths
Viola Farber in 7 Movements