Is there room for more than three minimalists in the new music marketplace? It seems that anyone making music based in a limited number of melodic/rhythmic fragments played in repeating cycles is instantly designated an imitator or follower of the minimal music triumvirate: Steve Reich. Philip Glass, and Terry Riley. Even laMonte Young. the acknowledged originator of the minimal process, is only given an occasional nod. If that son of logic prevailed in other music forms. rock history would end with the Beatles, classical. with Beethoven. and jazz with Charlie Parker I mean, all that jazz sounds the same, right? Of course it doesn't, and neither does minimal music. which has long since expanded beyond the origins of that term, though it still serves journalistic convenience. But this attitude has caused some casualties, and one of them has been David Borden. . Borden is a contemporary of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and they all arrived at the same musical locale at about the same rime. "I. met both Steve Reich and Philip Glass in 1970," recalls Borden. They were both friends of a dancer named Barbara Dilly who was teaching at Cornell [University] that summer. First I met Steve, who's a Cornell graduate. He'd just come back from Africa, and he played me some African music and some of his music. and I played him some of my music, and we were both surprised at how similar it was. He urged me to move to New York and make my fortune. In the fall Philip Glass came by. and we had basically the same conversation. But I never moved to New York." Perhaps because he didn't move to the Apple and hustle his music the way Glass and Reich have, he's now perceived as a minimalist-come-lately. But Borden's music is equally evocative as Glass', Reich S, or Riley's and as distinct from theirs as they are from each other.. It's a complex polyphony of sound. embroidered through his synthesizers into an electronic mandala.

Borden. who was born in Boston on Christmas Day. 1938, has a conventional academic background. He began studying piano at the age of six and went on to earn degrees in musk from the Eastman School of Music and Harvard University. Then he proceeded into the grant and fellowship circuit with Ford Foundation and ASCAP grants and a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Germany. There were two turning points in Borden's career. The first occurred when he moved to Ithaca. New York to become a composer-in-residence for the Ithaca School District. It was a case of being in .the right place at the right rime. "I introduced myself to Robert Moog, who was just starting his synthesi1er company in a storefront." remembers Borden. "He showed me how to play the synthesizer. I didn't know anything about input or output then." Moog gave Borden unlimited use of his synthesizer studio during the prototype days of the Moog System The~ modular unit., He started, like everyone else, to get as many sounds as be could extract from this new instrument. But then the second turning point came and signaled a new direction. "The Terry Riley record [In C] was a shot in the arm and pointed to a return to tonality, Before that, if you were a composer going to school in the mid-'6Os you had to deal with a lot of European music-Boulez, Stockhausen, serial techniques-and a lot of American attitudes towards that. which meant a heavy Milton Babbitt influence." Armed with his synthesizers, Borden began reinvestigating tonality.ln 1969 he formed one of the first live performance synthesizer ensembles, Mother Mallard Portable Masterpiece Co. It was a decidedly unacademic name. With Steve Drews and Linda Fisher as the first Mother Mallards, they released two albums, their eponymous debut in 1974 and Like a Duck to Water in 1976, both on their own Earthquack record label. Drews glisandoing cycles on Cres Motion and Borden’s mechanical sequencers on Easter and his inward spirals of C-A-G-E II established the terrain of Mother Mallard. “Those were great days, traveling around with people saying ‘What’s that?’” reflects Borden. “It got to be a hassle after awhile though, because we were billed not as David Borden or Mother Mallard, but as the Moog synthesizer.”

The synthesizer was also a lot more difficult to play then. This was in the days of spaghetti-like webs of patch chords in a telephone operators-style patchbay. “We used to train like the military,” claims Borden. “Steve, Linda and I would time ourselves on how long it took to set up a piece, tear it down, change all the settings, and go at it again. We’d do that for two or three hours until we could change from one piece to another in about five minutes. Because if you go from the C-A-G-E series of pieces to Oleo Strut or Train, the settings are completely different.”

In Borden’s current ensemble, which includes keyboardists Paul Epstein from the Laura Dean Dancers and Nurit Tilles from Steve Reich & Musicians, he uses two Roland Juno-60s. Because of their ability to switch instantly from sound to sound by just punching a couple of numbers into the preset memory, Borden can move from one piece to another faster and also have more sounds within a given piece. However, he also still uses three Minimoogs and his old modular Moog which is going on 15 years old now. With an RMI electric piano, he basically has seven keyboards for six hands.

These six hands plus the recent addition of a vocalist and viola de gamba player, are weaving some of the most complex and exquisite polyphony this side of J.S. Bach. “I’ve always loved contrapuntal music,” says Borden, “from Guillaume de Machaut through the Renaissance and to Bach.” It also sets him apart from other composers in the field who generally create unison melody lines. “With the help of a four-track tape recorder,” explains Borden, “I can write three or four distinct parts and make them come together, because I can superimpose them on each other. I compose one person’s part all the way through, then the second person’s and so on. So it’s not written in a vertical way at all. Harmonically I think of it as scales.”

For all its structural complexity, there’s a compulsive beauty to Borden’s occilating cycles. His Continuing Story of Counterpoint 1-10 is an epic work, rich in melodic invention and drama. Counterpoints Part 6 and Part 9 have been recorded on Borden's first non-Mother Mallard album, Music For Amplified Keyboard Instruments (Red Music: 002. available from NMDS. 500 Broadway. NVC 10012). There" a vitality in Borden’s precise music that can be attributed to his work as an improvising pianist in the jazz tradition. He even plays in a cocktail lounge in Ithaca on weekends. "I have a relaxed. Dave McKenna-style of playing on piano," admits Borden."I do improvise. and that’s how I get my ideas. The Counterpoint pieces are baaed on one or two melodic fragments. and that’s about it. They're started at the beginning of Counterpoint Part One, and I use them in every one except Two, Six, and Ten. I saved three where I could be completely free to do anything I want."

The synthesizer is especially suited to this intricate music. It offers a precision of tone. rhythm, and color over a long period that can't be obtained with conventional instruments. ""The synthesizer was amenable to the kind of music I'm doing because you could set an oscillator on it and let it drone for 10 minutes, and no one had to take a breath or bold a finger down. It could also keep a steady pulse.

Borden has rarely used the synthesizer for its far-reaching sonic capacities. His music sounds like it’s being played on si1ver-plaled harpsichords and by Baroque trumpet choirs. "Before the new synthesizer I went for simple sounds," says Borden. "a lot of unison sawtooth waves and various degrees of filter, but I don't have any preferred sounds. The music has to have a clarity plus two or three things going on at once, which sounds like a contradiction, but I try to make it so it’s an experience, coming together as a whole:"

Borden'a career has been marked by a series of near-misses, typified by his commissioned score for director William Friedkin’s film The Exorcist. For some reason Friedkin only used about 45 seconds of Borden’s electronic music, opting instead for Mike Oldfield’s timely minimalist derivation on his Tubular Bells opus. He still refuses to move to New York to "make his fortune," but perhaps the time has come. for us to look to Ithaca. Borden is currently unfolding all 10 of hit Counterpoint pieces for a two record set to be released at the end of 1983. It should cause quite a few people to take notice of this modem master of electronic counterpoint.