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"An Ear For Detail" by John Von Rhein , Chicago Tribune, 19 May 1996 |
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As classical recording costs mount and new digital recordings get swallowed up-practically as soon as they are released-by the thousands of other titles that clog the compact disc bins in records stores, more and more record companies are raiding their vaults for marketable historical performances. Who benefits? Everyone. From the companies' perspective, historical reissues of material dating from the 78-rpm era, roughly 1900 to 1948, provide a relatively low-cost, low-risk means of plugging gaps in their catalogs while maintaining a prestigious presence in an overcrowded market. Although sales figures are closely guarded, there is no question that many collectors of a certain age will opt for a reissue of a famous older recording over the brand-new recording by Brand X, assuming a preference for modern digital sound is not a decisive factor. Since most historical reissues retail for several dollars less than new, top-line product, their attractiveness may be that much greater. Virtually all the major labels-EMI, London, Philips, BMG Classics/RCA, Teldec-produce their own lines of historical recordings, and a sixth, Sony Classical, is about to take the plunge in earnest. Various small, independent labels such as Pearl, Biddulph, Romophone, Dutton, VAI and Music and Arts go where these corporate giants have feared to tread. Typically these independent labels license old recordings from the majors once they have determined that the majors aren't interested in reissuing the materials themselves. The renewed interest in historical recordings in the CD era has given rise to a new breed of technician-the transfer engineer. This is the person whose job it is to take the original recording, clean up as many sonic imperfections as possible, transfer it to digital audio tape and use that tape as the master for a CD. Several major recording companies have turned the process over to automated computer processes, such as NoNoise (Philips, BMG) and Cedar (EMI, Teldec). But listening experience has shown there is no substitute for a good set of ears, attached to an individual with an extraordinary degree of musical as well as aural sensitivity. Perhaps no one better appreciates that fact than H. Ward Marston. The affable 43-year old Philadelphian is among the handful of transfer engineers in the world whose names are synonymous with tender loving care to collectors of historical CDs. Others in this select group include Mark Obert-Thorn in America and Keith Hardwick, Anthony Griffith, and Michael J. Dutton in England. Among Marston's many credits are RCA's complete Fritz Kreisler and Grammy Award-winning Sergei Rachmaninoff editions, several Leopold Stokowski sets for Pearl and Biddulph, and numerous singer anthologies for Romophone and RCA devoted to the likes of Rosa Ponselle, Beniamino Gigli, Marian Anderson, Claudia Muzio, Mary Garden and Tito Schipa. Both Marston and Obert-Thorn are independent contractors who work for many different record companies, unlike such in-house specialists as Sony's Seth Winner and BMG's John Samuels. Marston began transferring 78s to long-playing discs around 1975. Obert-Thorn, a fellow Philadelphian who became interested in the field partly by studying Marston's example, set up his shop about a decade later. The two regard one another more as colleagues than competitors, since each has more work than he can handle and each has defined his own turf. Marston presently specializes in vocal recordings, Obert-Thorn in orchestral and instrumental discs, although Marston continues to shuttle back and forth. "I guess you could say my whole life has been meant for this work," Marston says. He isn't kidding. A classical and jazz pianist, avid record collector, classical radio announcer, bandleader, electronics and history buff, the man has done it all. He estimates he has 25,000 records in his collection. That he has been blind since birth seems incidental to his achievement, though many people assume there must be a connection. "A lot of people think that because I'm blind I have better ears than sighted people; that's simply not true," he says. "What I have-and what I think most blind people have-is an ability to concentrate on sound. We're not distracted by what is going on around us in the visual sphere. I'm able to focus on sound the way sighted people focus on an image; that gives me a particular advantage." The only outside help Marston says he requires is a sigthed person to read the numbers on record labels and to make the necessary adjustments for 78s that were faultily pressed. "I have found that, with most 78s, the hole in the center of a record is not properly centered, which creates a pitch fluctuation that can be very annoying," he says. Ottherwise, Marston does everything himself-including tape editing, a task many a sighted person would find daunting. He has no trouble finding work. Sometimes he is approached by record companies that have specific reissue projects in mind; sometimes they solicit ideas for projects from him. RCA's Kreisler omnibus, for example, came about beacause Marston was able to persuade company executives, including the late producer, Jack Pfeiffer, of its historical and artistic worth. (Marston, as it turned out, also had personal reasons for talking up the project. Several years before, he was the transfer engineer for a Biddulph set containing the violinist's acoustical recordings. But he was dissatisfied with the quality of those earlier transfers and was just biding his time until given the opportunity to do the job properly.) Transferring records successfully from one medium to the next starts with finding the best source materials. "People think my transfers sound good because I try to use perfect copies of the original records," Marston says. Very often his ideas for historical reissues-and the source materials themselves-come from his own collection. Just as often, laborious detective work is needed to track down a mint-condition disc. For a projected CD set of the complete Pathe recordings of soprano Emma Calve, he was unable to locate five particularly rare song titles; not a single collector he contacted in America had them. After many months of searching, he finally turned up four of the five missing titles through a friend in England. Then another English collector came foward with the fifth. At the moment Marston is hot on the trail of some unpublished recordings of tenor John McCormack and broadcast material of Spanish soprano Lucrezia Bori. Once the source materials are in hand, what's next? In Marston's home recording studio he has a state-of-the-art turntable capable of playing records at any speed between 15 and 120 rpm. Speed must be constantly monitored during the transfer process because the pitch of a recording can vary considerably, even during the four-minute duration of a single 78-rpm side. Though Marston possesses absolute pitch, he always checks himself against a pitch oscillator. It's also crucial to have different styli, or needles, with which to play the 78s, he says. Each disc may require a different stylus, depending on the shape of the record grooves or how worn the disc is. Using his ears as guide, he chooses the stylus that extracts the most music with the least noise. Then he feeds the output of the phonograph cartridge through a preamplifier on its way to a tape recorder. Once the music has been committed to analog tape, surface noise from the original discs must be removed. Marston uses the NoNoise system to remove the worst clicks and pops without compromising the tonal quality of the music. In this respect, he considers himself a "non-interventionist" recording engineer. (Obert-Thorn tends to go in for more noise-filtering.) Marston says it can take him anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours to transfer one 78-rpm side to tape, depending on the condition of the original shellac disc. In the end, transferring old records is much more of an art than a science. No studio filled with the most modern computerized equipment can achieve what one engineer with sharp ears, a comprehensive knowledge of music and the tender loving care of a Ward Marston can do. "My intent, when I transfer 78-rpm records, is to make them sound as much like real music as possible," he explains. Yet Marston is perfectly willing to admit to his own past failures of judgment. "In 1990 I had what you might call an epiphany," he says. "Listening to some of my older transfers, my ears were opened and I realized I was transferring those 78s according to a preconceived notion of what 78s should sound like, rather than the way music should really sound. Who knows but in another five years I'll find fault with the transfers I'm doing today. "I'm always trying to increase my awareness of sound. And I'm always willing to improve my transfer methods." It helps, of course, that he is a musician and has been around music all his life. He began playing piano at age four and continues to perform with his own jazz combo, Ward Marston Music, which has played various gigs in Chicago. He started collecting records when he was five. When he was seven, his parents gave him a tape recorder and he began putting some of his favorite old recordings on tape. Marston contiued experimenting with tape dubbing techniques after graduating from Williams College, where he hosted his own radio program. For a time he engineered a series of historic reissues for the International Piano Library, later serving as engineer and technical consultant for the Franklin Mint's reissues of archival recordings. Even though he has more than enough recording projects to keep him occupied for the next several years, something in his questing nature compels him to take on even more. This fall he and his partner, Scott Kessler, plan to launch their own budget-priced recording label, name to be determined. It will focus on historical reissues, with such once-famous singers as Ninon Vallin, Vanni Marcoux, Yvonne Gall and Charles Panzera, along with great instrumentalists from the early years of the phonograph. Marston's brain is buzzing with all sorts of ideas for the label-most valuably-a thorough documentation of French vocal style as recorded by the artists who defined that now-vanished art. "At least I won't have to hire a recording engineer," he chuckles.
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