Re: wow... Mother Mallard history text

[RA336@aol.com]

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

------------------------------------------


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