INTERVIEWED BY PIERO SCARUFFI
TM, ®, Copyright © 1999 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
The first electronic ensemble was founded upstate New York, not far from where Robert Moog had invented the synthesizer. David Borden, fresh from his Berlin studies, learned how to operate Moog's machines and started composing electronic pieces for ballett. In may 1969 the Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Company was born, namely Borden and two friends. Two albums later, Borden was ready to try other avenues. His solo albums contain long compositions that recall minimalism but with a peculiar harmonic twist, as much Terry Riley as Bach, as much Steve Reich as free jazz. Borden's masterpiece, "The Continuing Story Of Counterpoint", surfaced little by little over the years and was finally premiered in 1989. Borden has also composed the oratorio "Angels: Visions And Apparitions" and countless chamber music for keyboards. Last summer Borden started performing again as Mother Mallards. Borden is currently the head of Cornell University's Digital Music Department.
Your bios are very detailed after you returned from Germany. But what was going on before that? I only know that you grew up in Boston... "Before I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Berlin at the Hochschule f=FCr Musik with Boris Blacher, I had just finished a Master of Arts degree in Music at Harvard University in Boston. This was in the summer of 1965. Before that, I studied for five years (1958-63) at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester NY and earned a Bachelor and Masters in Music Composition. At Harvard I studied with Leon Kirchner and Randall Thompson and at Eastman I studied with Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson.
But, as I look back at important influences, I have to say despite all of the fantastically talented and intelligent peers and teachers I encountered at both schools, the memories that helped shape my musical outlook stemmed in great part from hanging out in Storyville, the Boston Jazz Club, during my late high school years ( I grew up in Brookline, just outside of Boston) and the two years (1956-58) I attended Boston University. When I was at BU, I befriended a young blind pianist, Dave Mackay, who was a graduate student in music, and the intermission pianist at Storyville. Since he didn't know Braille yet, I helped him with his reading and written work. So, almost every night, I would be at Storyville helping Dave. He lived in the Copley Square Hotel, which also housed Storyville. Although I had hung out there during my high school years, it was nothing like the experience of hearing great jazz artists night after night, and after hours, meeting and hanging out with them with Dave Mackay. The only two artists I didn't encounter there during this time were Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. I heard Miles a several times at other places, but I never did get to see and hear Monk live. But I did experience, in person, Duke Ellington, Clifford Brown, Max Roach, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Cannonball Adderly, Bobby Timmons, Roy Eldridge, Count Basie, Joe Williams, Sarah Vaughn, Erroll Garner, etc.
I was also studying classical piano with Margaret Chaloff, Serge Chaloff's mother, one of the greatest baritone saxophone players jazz has ever produced. I was there when he died at the young age of 32 from cancer, but really from a life of alcohol and drug addiction. Mrs. Chaloff was never really the same after this loss.
Although I was studying classical piano, I had, over the years in my late teens, studied with a couple of jazz teachers, and improvised any chance I got. So, my earliest aspirations were connected to jazz playing and arranging/composing. In fact, my first trip to Europe was at the age of 19 in the summer of 1958, playing with a college jazz quintet. We played on the boat over and back for out passage, and ended up giving playing daily concerts in the American Pavilion at the Brussells World's Fair.
Eventually I drifted away from jazz and into modern concert music. I realized that if I wanted to pursue jazz, I would have to give it my full attention, because there were so many outstanding players, and arrangers. You couldn't do it part time. I still miss one of my close friends, Gary McFarland, one of the outstanding arrangers of the 60s and early 70s, who died from complications having to do with drugs and alcohol. Needless to say, drugs have always been anathema to me, although I occasionally have wine or beer."
The "Counterpoint". How did the idea come? Did you have the plan in your mind from the very beginning? Was it a statement about avant-garde music? And in retrospect "what" do you think has been the main achievement of the 'Counterpoint" in the history of late 20th century.
"I fell in love with counterpoint at an early age when I first encountered Bach in my piano lessons, around the age of 9 or 10. I saw quickly that each voice had a life of its own. I was intuitively drawn to that approach, rather than chords and melody. The next big insight was the discovery of modern music. When my piano teacher introduced me to Debussy, Hindemith and Bartok, especially the last two, I felt overjoyed. I must have been 13.
I came from a very poor and uneducated family, and although my father could play the piano (he learned late in life), I just thought, from what he played, that modern music was Duke Ellington and Gershwin, but that classical music was something that no one composed anymore. So, when I discovered the "new" harmonic language, it blew me away. I loved it. I still loved Bach, but I also loved the contrapuntal pieces of Bartok and Hindemith, with the fresh-sounding intervals.
I was also discovering jazz artists like Bud Powell, Charlie Parker and Dave Brubeck--the idea of improvising--making it up as you go along--this was extremely liberating. Later, when I discovered that these players were actually improvising over pre-arranged chord changes, I was truly disappointed. So, when "free" jazz first happened with Ornette Coleman, it was something I had been doing unknowingly for years, and forming groups in high school to improvise freely also. I stopped when my first jazz teacher told me it just wasn't done. But later, Jaki Byard, my last jazz teacher, although he "played the changes" and expected you to learn them--he encouraged any kind of free improvisation you could think of.
What I remember was improvising by making up more than one melodic line at once, creating two or three lines at once, and dropping the chord idea. It was my early way of improvising with counterpoint, rather than the traditional right hand melodic invention being supported by the left hand chord voicings.
Later, when attending college, from Boston University through Harvard Graduate School, I took as many counterpoint classes as possible, many more than I needed to graduate. I always came away disappointed. Not by the music, but that none of teachers seemed to offer any new insights into what I already knew. In fact, Randall Thompson took me to his office to ask me if I liked Bach (we were studying the Art of =46ugue) because I seemed to be getting nothing out of it. The truth of it was, that I was bored by his classes.
As for outstanding "counterpoint" pieces of that late twentieth century, I regard Steve Reich's revival of canon techniques in almost all of his work, including PIANO PHASE, to be wonderfully refreshing and beautiful. Listen to the wonderful use of canon and augmentation in his PROVERB. Then there is the "improvised" canon technique used by Terry Riley in IN C. The improvised part is the point of entry and number of repetitions each player chooses--but the whole piece is a freely expanding canon. The other contrapuntal masterwork I recommend for careful listening is Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano solo, available on ECM by Keith Jarrett." Piero-- I have just recently discovered a far better recording of the Schostakovich Preludes & Fugues by Tatiano Nikolayeva--a young pianist (in 1950) whose performance of the complete Bach 48 Preludes & Fugues inspired Shostakovich to compose his 24. The Keith Jarrett is very very good, don't get me wrong, but this recording has that "definitive" sound to it. It's on Hyperion.
Now that you have completed this massive opus, what next? Do you feel exhausted or do you feel you have built foundations upon which you can built something else. "I have completed several large pieces since 1987 when I finished composing The Continuing Story of Counterpoint. ANGELS, and evening-length piece for vocal ensemble, vocal soloists and synthesizer ensemble was completed in 1989-90 and performed at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors in New York, and at New Music American in Montreal (Canada) by Mother Mallard and American Voices, Neely Bruce conducting. Then, in 1992-93 I completed NOTES FROM VIENNA for Wind Ensemble and electric guitar solo. The solos parts are complete cello parts from Beethoven, Schubert and Haydn transplanted to the electric guitar, and accompanied by entirely new music of my own. It's like moving some individuals out of their old apartments into new surroundings. This was performed in March of 1993 by the Cornell University Wind Ensemble, and Gabriel Borden, electric guitar with Mark Scatterday conducting. In 1993-94 I composed a concerto for two fortepianos and chamber orchestra called SILENT STARS with movements named after silent movie stars (Lon Chaney, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Buster Keaton). I had done some improvising on synthesizers accompanying silent films, so this gave me the idea. This was performed in 1995 by fortepianists Penelope Crawford and David Breitman, with the Michigan Technical University Orchestra, Jeffrey Bell-Hanson conducting. Since 1996 Ed Murray, a colleague at Cornell, and I have been giving two-piano jazz concerts, sort of getting back to our "roots". And last year I reactivated Mother Mallard, and hope to give more concerts this year. I have again been working on VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF PHILIP GLASS which I started in 1990, but dropped when Mother Mallard became inactive. The new group is bigger and better than ever. Hopefully we will give some concerts and make a few recordings."
One more technical question, about counterpoint and jazz improvisation. Counterpoint is the quintessence of western classical music, it is the foundation of our concept of music. Jazz improvisation comes from a completely different ethnic heritage and concept of music. How do you reconcile the two? And what happens a musician reconciles them? That's a very good question, something no one has ever asked me before. First of all, I've always preferred music with a steady beat.=20 That's what attracted me to Bach, and it's the interaction of the voices, their overlapping forward rhythmic movement that gives the music its impelling force. The Baroque period has this quality in general, but of the two giants of the period (Handel of course being the other), Bach also has a more abstract quality. Even though there are all those cantatas with stories being told, the structure of the music is complicated. It's something that has to be looked at up close in order to understand it better-to see what makes it work. Not long ago I attended a concert in which Christopher Hogwood conducted Handel in the first half, and Bach in the second, and it was obvious that Handel was elegant and tasteful, qualities associated with a sociable, extroverted personality, but Bach's music was more rigorous. He came off as introverted and oblivious anything except whatever the music demanded of itself, indifferent to the affect it may have had on the listener. Bach was more difficult to play and threw many more notes at the audience in an overwhelming kind of way. Handel comes to you, Bach makes you come to him. In a way these two composers personified an elegant kind of human two-part invention that embodied the European musical Baroque at it's highest level. Of course counterpoint is more than Bach and Handel, but it's a good jumping off place.
As for jazz, the steady beat, the syncopation-qualities I love in good counterpoint, are also present. The big difference is improvisation, at least in the present time. We tend to forget that both Bach and Handel could improvise fugues on the spot. Bach is known to have improvised five-voice fugues whenever he wanted to impress the competition (in those days, there were concerts that could be called "Battle of the Organists"). In western classical music, the true art of improvisation has been lost, with some exceptions. In the 60s Lukas =46oss had an improvisation ensemble, and in Rome, ex-patriot American composer Frederic Rzewski and others including Richard Teitelbaum formed MEV (Musica Electronnica Viva) as an improvisation ensemble. What I noticed, having seen so many master musician jazz improvisers was that the classical musicians who improvised were not a.) improvising in a manner to expand an ongoing tradition, like the jazz players, and b.) were not trying to find their own voice or style like Coltrane or Monk, but approached improvisation as a way to contribute something to a group effort, or more precisely, to collectively contribute in the process of making a piece. In jazz, "the piece" usually already existed. The soloist was expected to take it to places not visited before, and to new heights as well. So when Thelonious Monk plays "Don't Blame Me", one recognizes the "piece" but Monk has made it his own-he might as well include himself as co-composer, just like Bach would make a Lutheran chorale his own by reharmonizing it, and composing a variation on it as well.
=46or counterpoint IN jazz, all you have to do is listen to dixieland to realize that from very early on, jazz used the idea of combining simultaneously improvised voices. Maybe the trumpet tends to have the "lead" voice, but the clarinet and trombone are always active, and mostly EQUAL voices. It's true that most jazz from bebop on tends to be the rhythm section accompanying the soloist, but there are exceptions. In the mid-fifties, around the time that Charlie Parker died, jazz was unofficially divided into East Coast and West Coast Jazz in the USA. As a teenager, I loved the innovative composing and arranging of west coast jazz clarinetist/saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre.=20 His best known groups had no drummers. One trio consisted of trombone (Bobby Brookmeyer), guitar (Jim Hall) and Giuffre. The group was musically outstanding, but very different from most jazz groups in that the arrangements were very contrapuntal. Jimmy was my first composition teacher. I sought him out when he came to Boston to play at Storyville, and he influenced my thinking about composing in a very big way. Although I was already studying counterpoint on my own, having it used in jazz writing, albeit not mainstream, was a great example for me. You can see Jimmy's group at the beginning of the Newport Jazz Festival Documentary "Jazz on a Summer's Day" made in the late fifties. Gerry Mulligan's groups of the mid to late fifties used to have group improvisation sections in many of their arrangements, especially the group with Bobby Brookmeyer on trombone and Zoot Simms on Tenor Saxophone. But also, the Charlie Mingus groups of the late fifties and early sixties used to experiment a lot with group improvisation, with wonderful results. He must have coached his players in developing sympathetic ears. Listen to "Mingus AH UM". The last Bill Evans Trio was also an amazingly contrapuntal group with drummer Joe LaBarbara and bassist Marc Johnson contributing equal voices to the piano, not merely accompanying. Bill was starting to spiral in a new direction just when he died in 1980.
As for me, when I play "tunes" for the few piano concert dates I do, I like to play with another pianist, and make two-piano arrangements of standard tunes. I have evolved a routine with my pianist partner, Edward Murray (also a fine conductor) in which we alternate playing two-piano duos with each of us doing a solo. When I improvise in this context, my playing tends to be much more contrapuntal than Ed's because he thinks in terms of harmonic function much more than I do. I always think in terms of groove time, and contrapuntal forward motion, so our styles are almost totally different which makes for good concerts (I think). In my Mother Mallard concerts, I prefer to hire players who also play jazz and who have a feel for groove time. I also leave spots open for improvisation in some of my "concert" pieces with Mother Mallard. Just listen to the Continuing Story of Counterpoint, Part Ten. There are many other examples of improvisation featuring my son Gabriel, a virtuoso electric guitarist, but these pieces have so far, not been released. On the Cuneiform CD of mine called PLACES, TIMES & PEOPLE, Gabe does some improvising as well as jazz cellist Hank Roberts. So, I have never held the view that counterpoint and jazz improvisation, despite their different historical beginnings, have been separate, but that they compliment each other in the hands of great musicians like Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Jaki Byard (one of my teachers also) and many others. For an early example (1970) of jazz-influenced improvisation in a non-jazz piece, and the earliest example of a synthesizer ensemble (all Moogs) listen to my EASTER on the recently released CD, MOTHER MALLARD'S PORTABLE MASTERPIECE CO. 1970-1973. So, combining counterpoint and jazz elements has been with me for a very long time.
As for the last part of your question, " . . . what happens when a musician reconciles them?"- I think the musician becomes a better musician, but not necessarily a richer one.
Now that I have listened to your entire opus, one question comes to mind: why electronic instruments? What is intriguing about synthesizers, the range of sounds or the "programmability"? In your case, the curiosity doubles because, in my opinion,... you never truly exploited the timbric capabilities of electronic music. Piero, that's another very penetrating question. You've obviously done your homework. If you listen to the very early pieces like EASTER and CLOUDSCAPE from the 1970, you will notice that these pieces have more colorful timbres than most of the "Counterpoint" pieces. This is because I started out by making them as tape pieces in the studio, so I experimented with various types of sounds that to me, were unique.=20 Very soon after I had completed these pieces, I knew that I wanted to perform them live if I could. This involved making an arrangement with Bob Moog and the Moog Co., because they had to change their insurance if the synthesizers were moved from the Company premises. You must understand, that I started working with synthesizers only through the generosity of Bob Moog, and his steady encouragement, but I myself didn't own the instruments, and couldn't afford to buy them. To make a long story short, Bob agreed to let us (Mother Mallard, in it's formative stage) take the synthesizers out of the studio and give live concerts. Eventually, we as a group bought them over time, directly from Bob, because no bank would give us a loan. Immediately, it became obvious that since every sound had to be patched in manually, and that some of these patches changed in the middle of the pieces, that we had to rehearse just as long at the patching routines as we did the music.=20 In fact, the patching was so complicated, that it sometimes took fifteen minutes to setup between pieces. Today, all one has to do is wait until the computer makes all the changes in seconds, but back then it was a real problem. So, we used to rent wonderful short films and cartoons to show between pieces so that the audience would not have to sit around doing nothing, getting bored until we were ready. We eventually learned how to do the setups rather quickly, in the dark, with small flashlights, while the film was running. That's when we decided to compose new pieces that required less setup time, and therefore tended to have less exotic-sounding timbres. That's how I got into the habit of composing pieces with simple timbres. I think CAYUGA NIGHT MUSIC from the early 90s is my most timbre-rich collection of pieces, but at the moment it is out of print. Another reason for this less than colorful approach is my tendency to build my music on pitch related ideas and intellectual manipulation of musical ideas rather than purely approaching it as sound painting, like so many "ambient" and "new age" composers do. What attracted me to synthesizers in the first place was the Buckminster Fuller idea of doing more with less. With three players playing synthesizers, one could cover a wider range of pitches and timbres than three people playing conventional instruments. And besides, in 1967, it was my destiny to be there, in Trumansburg NY, where the synthesizer as a new electronic instrument was being invented, built and refined by Bob Moog. Who could pass that up?
Finally, why did you decide to resuscitate the name Mother Mallards last summer? And I forgot one question in between: why so many years elapsed between Mother Mallards' albums and your first solo album?
Although my music has always been a critical success, it has never been much of a money-maker, so people were not breaking down my door to make recordings. Also, in 1991 the players in Mother Mallard complained bitterly about the inept management we had, and said that unless I found new management, they couldn't continue even though they loved the music. They were right, the management was bad, but I couldn't find anyone else. So I gave up playing live for awhile. I didn't realize it would be seven years before our next concert in the summer of 1998.=20 But shortly after firing the manager, my personal life took a major turn. I had been living with my ex-wife for several years, but it just didn't work out, so I moved out. In fact, I changed addresses 3 or 4 times in less than a year, so my living situation was unstable. But in 1992 I met my second wife-to-be, Rebecca, and we eventually got married a couple of years later. During this time my son and new stepson were alternating finishing college and going of the road (both are excellent musicians). So this period of my life was spent establishing a new relationship, and sending the kids through college. Both graduated from Cornell, one in film (stepson Sam) and the other (son Gabriel) in physics. With that accomplished, I started up Mother Mallard again, with both Sam (keyboards) and Gabe (electric and acoustic guitar) as part of the ensemble. In addition, the group now has four keyboardists, a female vocalist, woodwind player (Les Thimmig from the former MM) and as I mentioned earlier, sounds better than ever. I am looking for concerts on my own, and looking for help in management, but very carefully. At 60, I am doing all of this in a less frantic way than in my youth. I am in very good health, and composing all the time, and look forward to giving as many concerts with Mother Mallard as possible.