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Hey everybody.
For anyone interested, here follows the program notes as writtien by David
Borden for the Mother Mallard Reunion Concert last week at Cornell
University. I will be posting the additional performance notes later today.
best regards to all; enjoy the history lesson!
Robby Aceto
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Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Co.
The Early Years (1968-1973)
In 1966-68 I was composer-in-residence for the Ithaca City School
District. I had come directly from West Berlin, Germany where I had been
studying as a Fulbright student. In 1967 I introduced myself to Bob Moog
whom
I had heard about from several people around Ithaca. Bob had his company
in
Trumansburg which is a twenty minute drive from Ithaca.
Bob was happy to see someone interested in learning and using his new
invention, the voltage-controlled electronic synthesizer. To me, it looked
like the cockpit of an airplane and hopelessly complicated. Bob though,
took
me under his wing and patiently taught me how to use it although I ruined
some of his modules along the way. In fact, I hooked them up in such a
bizarre way, not understanding what I was doing, that they redesigned
several
of the modules having not anticipated someone as totally unaware of the
principles behind the design as I was. Otherwise they could have been
facing
many returned synthesizers burned out by neophytes like me. I didn’t
realize
Bob was using me as a test person until several months later when it was
clear that I finally knew what I was doing. He explained that I helped in
the
research to idiot-proof the soon-to-be famous Moog Synthesizer. I had been
chief idiot, which upon reflection, I enjoyed immensely.
By 1968 I was hired by Cornell University as Composer-Pianist for
Dance.
Since the dance program was part of the Women’s Physical Education Program
which in turn was administered by the Department of Athletics, we were a
very
insignificant part of the operation, and although my title looked good on
paper, in reality I was listed in the directory as a Phys. Ed Instructor.
I
later learned that this was the lowest paying staff job at Cornell. But
the
good thing was, I had no administrative responsibilities, no meetings to
attend and had only to prepare for teaching one half of one class; the
rest
was improvisation which I had been doing since I was ten years old. This
left
me plenty of time to work late into the night at the Moog Company (Bob had
given me a key to the place long before) discovering new ways to compose
using the huge modular Moog and the four-track Scully tape recorder. Soon,
I
was using the synthesizer in all of my compositions including the ones I
did
for dance concerts as part of my job.
In connection with the Dance Program, Peggy Lawler, the primary dance
instructor/choreographer would arrange for students and staff (she and I)
to
travel to New York City to see modern dance concerts. This is when I
discovered Merce Cunningham and the musicians around him including John
Cage,
Gordon Mumma, David Behrman and David Tudor. Seeing them perform live
electronic music forever changed my way of thinking about performing
music.
Especially electronic music. Up until then, I thought of it as making
tapes
in a studio; after that I always thought of electronic music as something
to
be performed live even if occasionally pre-recorded tapes were involved.
In
1969 the Cunningham Company visited Ithaca for a performance and some
dance
workshops. It was then that I got to know Gordon Mumma and David Tudor who
would later participate in one of the first performances of Cloudscape For
Peggy (composed for Peggy Lawler’s choreography in 1970) which was one of
my
first all-synthesizer pieces designed for live performance. Late in 1968 I
decided to start my own live electronic (and amplified acoustic) group for
giving live concerts. I wanted to present very new and startling work. I
remember getting ideas from Mumma and Tudor as well as Source Magazine,
which
was an avant garde music publication out of Davis California which
featured
new pieces by young composers.
One of the first things I thought about was a name for the new
ensemble.
I wanted it to be ironic in some way. I certainly didn’t want an academic
sounding name. It was on my mind almost constantly for several days.
During
this time, while shopping in a supermarket, I leaned over the frozen food
section and the friendly senior-citizen face of Mrs. Smith of Mrs. Smith’s
Frozen Pies hit me and immediately I thought of my own grandmother, Lena
Belle Mallard. She was called Mother Mallard because she had had her
picture
taken for the Boston papers to show five generations of Mallards of which
she
was the progenitor. So OK, Mother Mallard had a nice alliteration, but
what
else? The word “masterpiece” followed because it began with an “m”, and
besides we were always joking about how it was no longer necessary nor
desirable to think in terms of masterpieces. So now I had the image I
wanted;
a friendly grandmother behind which we would perform outrageous pieces
like
Robert Ashley’s Wolfman, a feedback assault on the ears while miming the
movements of a crooner. A couple of days later the word “portable” was
inserted before “masterpiece” as an added oxymoronic juxtaposition. Mother
Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Co. was born. Our first concert was in May
of
1969 in Barnes Hall on the Cornell University campus. The concert included
Wolfman by Ashley, Pitch Out by Allen Bryant (for which Bard Prentiss made
the amplified string instruments played with metal bars and files), a
piece
by Dan Lentz which included a sinister looking man (Steve Drews) taking
collection in the audience, and finally some “classic” pieces by Morton
Feldman and John Cage. The audience loved it.
After this, I planned to compose pieces for live electronic
performance
using synthesizers. I talked with Bob Moog, and he agreed to let us use
whatever was available. My approach to composition was changing quickly
away
from the complex atonal methods being taught in most universities at the
time, to a simpler, tonal way of doing things. I had been very impressed
with
Terry Riley’s In C, so I started to work with drones and complex rhythms,
bringing my jazz background into play.
My work as a dance accompanist was affected by this also, as I tried out
various repeated patterns as part of my daily job. Then later at night I
would work them out at the Moog Studio. Using the four-track tape recorder
also appealed to me because it accentuated the contrapuntal approach I had
always favored when composing. Now I could compose one person’s part all
the
way through, and then add another person’s part on top with each part
retaining its individual integrity. This technique is commonly called
layering, but this kind of layering was more extreme - like working with a
cantus firmus, a very old medieval idea. My first tonal steady pulse piece
for the Moog was Easter which was composed for a dance student in April of
1970. I finished it a few days before Easter, hence the title. Steve Drews
and I performed it live with tape at Sage Chapel on the Cornell campus on
Easter Sunday, 1970. This was the first live performance using a MiniMoog.
We
had the prototype.
At about this time, Moog got a call from someone at Trinity Church in
Manhattan asking if he could recommend or supply a live performance
involving
the Moog Synthesizer for one of their Lunchtime Concerts. By this time
Moog
was becoming famous as an inventor due to the brisk sales of Switched-On
Bach, an LP release by Walter Carlos on Columbia Records. It was a
collection
of Bach classics realized on the Moog. It made the cover of Time Magazine.
So
Bob recommended me, and I asked Steve Drews to play Easter with me, using
a
prepared tape. This was the first public performance in New York City
using a
MiniMoog. Even though the official debut of the MiniMoog was months away
(by
Dick Hyman), we took the prototype with us to New York. When we got to
Trinity Church we found out that we hadn’t been billed as Mother Mallard
or
David Borden but as THE MOOG SYNTHESIZER. This kind of billing would
dominate
our appearances for the first few years, because no one else was
performing
with Moog Synthesizers except for Walter Carlos and Richard Teitlebaum.
Carlos almost never performed live and Teitlebaum was in Europe.
During the summer of 1970 I worked Summer School and was Barbara
Lloyd’s
accompanist. She was one of Cunningham’s star soloists and is now known as
Barbara Dilley. She has been president of Naropa Institute. Working with
Barbara was a joy, and I often brought a Moog to the dance studio to
improvise live on. I also worked with visiting filmmaker Ed Emshwiller and
did the soundtrack for his film Branches which he produced hurriedly with
summer students. In addition, I composed Cloudscape For Peggy for an
Ithaca
College performance by Peggy Lawler. It was during this summer that I
really
got to know Gordon Mumma (he was involved with Barbara at the time) who
greatly enhanced my knowledge of the perils of live electronic
performance.
At the time, he saw to it that all of John Cage’s ideas for Cunningham
were re
alized electronically. The going joke was that Cage, whom everyone loved,
and
who was the pioneer of live electronic performance had trouble plugging in
his electric razor. So Gordon took care of the technical problems. Steve
Reich was another visitor to Ithaca that summer. Cornell was his alma
mater,
and he was also interested in seeing the Moog Studio. We have been friends
ever since. Finally, Phil Glass passed through Ithaca the following fall
resulting in a friendship that still continues.
During the summer of 1970, Steve Drews also started composing pieces
for
Live performance using Moog Synthesizers. With the pieces I had done for
the
Cornell Dance Program, plus Steve’s new pieces, we had enough for an
entire
program of our own music using nothing but Moogs with an occasional guest
performer on another instrument. We asked Linda Fisher to join us in
giving
some concerts. She agreed, and in 1971 finally agreed to become a
permanent
member, contributing her RMI Electric Piano as well. The Moog Company kept
receiving requests for concerts and/or demonstrations, so they would
always
recommend us. That’s how we started travelling around giving concerts. We
also made a deal to buy several synthesizers over a four year period. We
had
gone to local banks for a loan, but were unsuccessful. So Bob let us pay
him
with quarterly payments, and refused to charge us interest.
In the fall of 1971, when Bob left the area, Mother Mallard rented a
rural farmhouse in Enfield, NY, between Trumansburg and Ithaca. Chris
Swanson, a jazz composer and recent user of the Moog Studio, found the
place.
It was perfect. Quiet, isolated and with low rent. Together we shared the
place as our work studio. Chris worked mornings and afternoons. We took
the
nights. It was here that we really came into our own, rehearsing almost
every
night, drilling ourselves on how quickly we could change the dozens of
patch
cords between pieces and blindly set up intricate sounds (i.e., without
testing them audibly before playing them). During the winter of 1971-72,
Merce Cunningham came to Binghamton which is an hour from Ithaca. With him
came some additional staff: his touring manager Jane Yockel and his
costume
manager, Margaret Wood. Margaret had been part of the Cornell Dance
Program.
She drove from Binghamton and brought Jane for dinner at my house. No
sooner
had they arrived than one of the worst blizzards in Finger Lakes history
hit.
Jane and Margaret were snowed in with us for four days and nights. This
turned out to be a blessing. Jane and Margaret, in partnership with Mimi
Johnson, (a young woman who managed John Cage’s affairs) were in the midst
of
starting their own managing team for performing avant garde artists.
Performing Arts Services was partially born under my own roof, and soon
Mother Mallard was one of their first clients. It was through the efforts
of
Artservices, as it became known, that MMPMC began to be frequent
performers
in various SoHo performance spaces, as well as the WBAI Free Music Store.
These appearances got us reviews in several places including the NY Times.
We
also reached a much wider audience than we would have otherwise.
During this time, Steve and I (and sometimes Linda) composed new
pieces
to perform. A few of our pieces, like Steve’s Ceres Motion employed the
use
of a mobius strip tape loop. Gordon Mumma turned us on to these. They came
in
various time lengths. You could tape something live and at the end of the
tape, turn off the record button and play it back instantly. Each of us
had a
stopwatch to keep track of the loop lengths. The first part of Ceres
Motion
is what is now commonly called a pad. Steve and I recorded the pad (around
4
minutes), played it back instantly, and being a loop, it would go on
forever
until we turned off the tape recorder. When the pad is played back for the
first time, the piece changes into an up tempo mantra with Steve
improvising
patterns on a Modular Moog and with his non-playing hand, adjusting the
knobs
of a fixed filter bank accentuating different harmonics for each section.
Stev
e found very exotic an beautiful sounds on the Moogs, and was a master
performer on the ribbon controller. My stuff kept to more simple sounds
with
the emphasis on multi-metered contrapuntal figures that repeated at
different
time lengths. In the early 70s, this kind of music was not yet called
minimalism. So critics would refer to it as “synthesizer music” , “trance
music” or simply deride it as boring because “nothing happened”.
By the fall of 1972 we had developed enough music to perform three or
four concerts without repeating anything. We started looking around for a
recording label. The audiences loved our concerts, and we thought our
music
was as good as any other new music, and that our performances had achieved
a
professional polish while at the same time sounding fresh and original. We
made many phone calls, talked with many record executives, sent out
countless
demo tapes to no avail. After several months of no takers, I decided to
start
my own record company. Margaret Wood at Artservices thought it was a great
idea. The only problem was, I only had half the money I needed. Margaret
had
looked into the costs of mastering, pressing and cover printing. I forget
how
much this amount was, but it was something like $1500. I only had half,
and
couldn’t get a loan. One of the people I approached about becoming a
partner
in starting a record company was Elliot Saltzman, a very funny guy, and
recent Cornell graduate who had started his own advertising agency. He
declined, but talked to Judy Borsher about it who was interested. She
called
me out of the blue, but I was reluctant because she was still a student
and
didn’t want it to appear like I was taking advantage of a younger person
who
stood a good chance of losing her investment. Unknown to me at the time,
Judy had been deeply moved by the music we were making, so she welcomed an
opportunity to get involved with the production of our work. Judy, who
would
later take Linda Fisher’s place in Mother Mallard, made it possible to
start
Earthquack Records. Mother Mallard as an image had long ago gone from a
friendly senior citizen to a duck. In fact, fans used to give us various
duck
gifts at concerts. So we went with it. We had a duck decoy perched on top
of
one of the synthesizers. The first LP was “in the can” by early fall, but
due
to delays in printing the cover and pressing the disks, the first LPs
weren’t
available until late January of 1974. We had it distributed through JCOA
(Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Association), a group pioneered by jazz
composer
Carla Bley. Artservices, seeing that producing independent LPs and getting
them distributed was not as difficult as they had imagined, started Lovely
Music modeled after this first Earthquack LP.
Meanwhile, director Billy Friedkin had heard some re-broadcasts of our
WBAI Free Music Store concerts and was interested in having me compose
music
for his new horror film. We were all invited to the cast party of The
Exorcist at the end of shooting, and Billy introduced us around to
everyone
as the people who were doing the soundtrack. In the end, he would use only
three short pieces I did for The Exorcist. He asked me if I was
considering a
move to Hollywood, and I said no. 1973 ended with offers from both
Hollywood
and Europe. I didn’t want to go to Hollywood, Steve didn’t want to go to
Europe and Linda wanted to do her own thing. A few months after that film
party in Manhattan, Mother Mallard would change forever.
In 1974, after having turned down an offer to tour Europe, and
deciding
not to relocate in Hollywood, Mother Mallard continued the same circuit.
In
New York City, the WBAI Free Music Store and downtown venues like the
Paula
Cooper Gallery, the Kitchen, and various lofts. Otherwise, there were
college
and university concerts, mostly in the northeast. By the end of 1974 Linda
let us know that she wanted to pursue her own path and by the summer of
1975
Judy Borsher joined us. There were a couple of interim keyboardists, but
they
were just temporary replacements. Judy had become part of the Mother
Mallard
“family” and had spent some time at rehearsals at our country studio.
What I
didn’t know was that when we weren’t there she would sometimes sit at the
keyboards and the play the parts. Judy proved to be excellent in every
way,
surprising us with her fluid keyboard technique and rapid grasp of the
technology.
By the end of 1975 Steve Drews decided he wanted to give up music and
pursue a career in photography (he has his own successful photography
studio
in St. Louis). He was replaced by Chip Smith, a wonderful keyboardist who
had
played with Chuck Berry, including his Carnegie Hall concert. This group
has
remained in my memory with great affection. Parts 5-8 of the Continuing
Story
of Counterpoint were written especially for this ensemble. After several
months Steve left Ithaca and withdrew his pieces from our repertoire. From
that point until now, Mother Mallard has played only my compositions. Also
with this group, I shouldered the financial responsibilities for all of
the
music equipment except for Chip Smith’s Fender Rhodes which was the second
polyphonic keyboard in our collection. When Linda Fisher left, I bought
her
RMI Piano. Now Mother Mallard had three Modular Moogs, two MiniMoogs, and
the
two electric pianos. Judy contributed her van for our transportation and
her
tremendous organizational business sense in finding funds, booking and
managing our concerts. Although we were constantly broke, we really
enjoyed
touring and playing. This group was the last of the Moog-based bands.
Unfortunately we never made a studio recording although there are some
live
tapes somewhere from a few concerts. It lasted from late 1975 to the
summer
of 1978. I then decided to spend more time with my family and give up the
band for awhile.
Now, in 1999 I can look back at some really great musicians who have
contributed to our performances over the years , but having had both my
guitarist son Gabriel, and keyboardist stepson Sam Godin take part has
been
very special.
- David Borden