Longtime local residents and music connoisseurs alike will already know that the history of the synthesizer is firmly embedded in Tompkins County lore. This is not only because Robert Moog studied engineering at Cornell and opened a factory in Trumansburg, but because David Borden, who has lived in Ithaca for 40 years, started the world’s first synthesizer ensemble here with the encouragement, equipment and technical assistance provided by Moog himself. During this time Borden has explored both the Moog technology and his own interests as a composer (today he is loosely associated with the term minimalism, though the word itself developed later than his early compositions in the style), and he has toured, recorded, and performed throughout the United States and Europe with his ensemble, the Mother Mallard Portable Masterpiece Co.
On Friday evening, Sept. 28, when Borden brings Mother Mallard to Barnes Hall for the ensemble’s first performance in 2007, the event will mark the 38th year in the ensemble’s existence. For the event, Borden has succeeded in realizing a concept that he’s been contemplating for years: a collaboration with live video projections that make use of images depicting two important early modern dancers, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn.
In the second half of the concert, Borden will premiere this new composition, titled “Third Sunset/The Dawns/Denishawn,” based on the two dancers, one of whom (St. Denis) Borden worked with during his graduate student days in Boston. The concert will also be the first by Mother Mallard to feature integrated live video in its performance.
Borden’s musical life has been intimately connected with modern dance since the beginning of his career. In 1968, after a Fulbright year in Germany and two years spent as composer-in-residence for the Ithaca City School District, Borden took a position as composer-pianist for the Cornell dance program. The position allowed him to spend long evenings at the Moog Company factory in Trumansburg familiarizing himself with the instruments (Moog gave him a key to the shop), which at the time were still very much in the research and development stage.
To hear Borden tell it, the learning curve was fairly steep, since the early Moog prototypes did not have keyboards but consisted entirely of pots, switches, and patch-cords, which were themselves used to manipulate oscillators, filters and modulators — an entire room filled wall to wall with them, in fact.
For Borden, those heady musical days were not limited to technical collaborations with Moog, but included exposure to the modern dance company led by Merce Cunningham, as well as to the composers who wrote for Cunningham’s company: John Cage, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and David Behrman. Tudor and Mumma in particular pioneered a method known as ‘live electronics,’ by which configurations of homemade electronics devices were routed through elaborate switching matrices in order to create self-contained systems for producing never-before-heard sound.
In 1969, when the Merce Cunningham Company visited Ithaca, Borden experienced “live electronics” for himself and made the acquaintance of Tudor and Mumma. “Seeing them perform live electronic music forever changed my way of thinking about performing music,” says Borden. Mumma and Tudor also made a pilgrimage to the Moog factory during their visit.
Borden retells the story, and hints at an explanation as to why the Cage-Tudor circle was sometimes less than enthusiastic about Moog (Cage had hired Moog as a technician once before, in 1965, for the performance of Cage’s Variations V at Lincoln Center, but the two did not seem to hit it off): “I remember we all went there to the factory one afternoon, Mumma and Tudor, and myself. And I was sitting off to the side as they were discussing technological issues. I think that maybe it bothered them that Moog wasn’t tenaciously on the live electronic avant-garde of what they were doing. But they certainly knew that he knew what he was doing. And he was certainly open to whatever they wanted to do. I mean, they thought it was a great thing, they were really interested in everything, but at the same time, he wasn’t really a part of their cultural milieu.”
These days, Borden is pleased to have the opportunity to bring to fruition an idea that has been with him for years, based on an experience that goes back to his student days at Harvard when he worked part-time as a piano accompanist around Boston.
One of his jobs included accompanying Ruth St. Denis, a pioneer in the world of dance since the end of the 19th century who at the time was still dancing, even though she was in her mid-80s. Born in New Jersey in 1879, St. Denis began as a vaudeville performer and toured the United States and Europe in the late 1890s, at which time she encountered Sarah Bernhardt and began to expand her approach beyond vaudeville techniques. By the years 1910-1915, Denis was touring the States regularly and was considered to be a solo performer on par with Isadora Duncan.
Though not a household name, Ruth St. Denis is now recognized by specialists for her path-breaking role in the development of early modern dance. After hiring Ted Shawn in 1914, who himself was a pioneer of sorts, the two began a collaboration that would last for years — including a marriage that later dissolved — and together they opened a school that produced some of the century’s greatest performers.
Titled “Denishawn,” the school’s pupils included none other than Martha Graham, Louise Brooks and Charles Weidman. Shawn later founded the dance festival in Massachusetts known as Jacob’s Pillow, a thriving dance center to this day. In capsule form, the life and work of both Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn reach from the end of the 19th century down into the turbulent 1960s and touch upon that history in important and essential ways. St. Denis died in 1968, not long after Borden worked with her as an accompanist. He conceives of his latest piece as a tribute to her, and to Shawn.
In conversation, Borden speaks with admiration and wonder about his own personal encounter with St. Denis. “She was a guest artist-lecturer at Radcliffe while I was there and they asked me if I would accompany her. I will always remember meeting her, she looked vaguely tired, she was obviously getting on in years, but she looked well, and I didn’t have any idea how old she was. We were setting up rehearsal times and I thought to myself, ‘I really shouldn’t ask her to get up too early in the morning,’ and so I asked if 10:00 or 10:30am would be okay? And she said, ‘Of course it would be okay, would you like to do it earlier?’”
Borden laughs fondly, adding, “And so we met the next morning and she gave me some music and said that ‘Ted and I did this in Paris.’ I had no idea who Ted was at the time, but the staff paper was old, and yellow, and it said ‘Paris 1910′ on it. It was the original thing, you know, and I thought ‘my god.’ And I played it for her.”
Borden has long used anagrams of proper names to provoke compositional choices in his own work. As it turns out, the anagram of Ruth St. Denis’ name is “Third Sunset,” while Ted Shawn’s is “The Dawns.” The correspondence struck Borden as significant, so he used the anagrammatic material to explore his own conception of the two dancers’ lives and work. He traveled to Jacob’s Pillow and spent a good deal of time combing through materials, documents and footage made available by the curator there. The documentation in turn provided the imagery to be used in the piece, and afforded Borden a deeper understanding of the performers and the ways in which their biographies shed light on his own compositional project. The live video portion has been prepared by Noni Korf Vidal and her husband Franck, both of whom live and work in Ithaca.
To no one’s surprise, Borden is the keeper of countless stories from his decades spent in Ithaca and Trumansburg, and he retells them with humor and affection. One of the best of these anecdotes concerns a visit to Ithaca by the now-legendary free jazz noise-maestro Sun Ra. Moog, as is well known, was quite fond of giving out early prototypes of his synthesizers to performers who would then use them for their own purposes and in the process reveal problems in construction and design. (Borden, in fact, had the very first Minimoog prototype ever made, and was the first live performer to use it.)
One tale in this connection that still tickles Borden relates to the occasion when Sun Ra came to Ithaca to visit the Moog factory. Borden explains: “Moog was great. He gave Sun Ra one of those early Minimoogs. Sun Ra had no idea how to use it. Still, Moog gave it to him, much to the consternation of his business managers — I mean uh oh, it’s the only model B prototype that we have! And he’s just given it away! But that’s the way Moog was.” Borden continues, “So Sun Ra came to Ithaca with his entourage to see the factory in Trumansburg. I was there and helped show them around. And when they left, all of the businesses in town — the motel, the restaurants, the liquor store, all of them — the checks had bounced, and Moog was stuck paying them, which he did. And he still gave Sun Ra a Minimoog anyway. Later, Moog went down and saw Sun Ra play in a pretty rough neighborhood, and Moog absolutely loved it, he thought that it was great to see the Minimoog being used in that context. That was probably 1968 or 1969.”
The spirit of collaboration and adventure have long permeated Borden’s own approach to composition and performance, and this Friday’s concert will be no different. In addition to mainstays David Yearsley, Blaise Bryski and Borden’s own son Gabriel, who will join the ensemble on guitar for one piece, the performance will feature new member Conrad Alexander, who teaches at Ithaca College, as well as digital video by Noni Korf Vidal and Franck Vidal. Borden hopes that the latest configuration of Mother Mallard has remained true to its original spirit while still adapting and offering surprises, and if Borden’s enthusiasm and warm demeanor are any indication, it almost certainly has.
David Borden and Mother Mallard will perform at Cornell’s Barnes Hall on Friday, Sept. 28, at 8pm. The concert is free and open to the public.
—by Aaron Tate