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"Ward Marston: Audio Resurrectionist" by Barrymore Laurence Scherer, |
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“Every generation has its own way of performing classical music, and recordings have documented evolving performance practice for more than a century,” observes record producer and recording engineer Ward Marston. “Therefore old recordings represent an important link to the history of performance practice.” Antique records are not just Mr. Marston’s passion as a collector — he is widely regarded as one of the best in the business of remastering historic recordings for digital production. Best known as “78s,” these heavy black shellac discs, which spun at 78 rpm on millions of phonograph turntables, were the standard format of commercial recording from around 1900 until the introduction of the vinyl LP in 1948. To a majority of music lovers in the world of CDs and MP3 downloads, 78s and the old phonographs that play them are relics, equivalent to Model Ts and steam locomotives. Embedded in their grooves, however, are many decades of music and music-making — from Heifetz, Rachmaninoff and Caruso to Ellington, Armstrong and Parker. And it is to the contents of those fragile discs, particularly classical ones, that Mr. Marston, 53, has dedicated himself. Restoring life to the shades of the past is an almost quixotic ideal in a world increasingly losing touch with history. But Mr. Marston feels strongly that these discs embody a living tradition of musical performance extending much further back in time than the discs themselves. “One of my favorite pianists is Benno Moiseiwitsch, who recorded in the 1920s,” he says. “Around 1910 he had been a pupil of Theodore Leschetizky, who had studied around 1850 with Carl Czerny, who had been the pupil of Beethoven around 1800.” Mr. Marston points out that this kind of lineage was important to the pedagogy of Moiseiwitsch’s time. Unlike today, when musicology rules performance practice with an iron hand, musicology in 1920 was in its relative infancy, and mainly concerned with Medieval music rather than core concert repertoire. The performer, rather than the scholar, was the final arbiter of taste, and a lineage such as Moiseiwitsch’s lent authority to his interpretations, whether of Beethoven or any of the great composers. Mr. Marston’s love affair with music and 78s dates to early childhood. His father owned a small record collection of famous classical pieces, which the boy had memorized by age three. At four he began teaching himself piano. At that time record collectors were replacing their shellac with new vinyl. “People began to give me 78s, and, when I was seven, close friends of my parents gave me around 100 album sets of Toscanini, Stokowski and chamber music.” In the heyday of 78s, a full symphony or string quartet normally took up four or five double-faced discs, so this collection comprised 400 to 500 records. Today, Mr. Marston’s home, in a Philadelphia suburb, is a veritable Aladdin’s cave housing about 35,000 78s. Many of these have made their way onto CDs on a variety of historic labels – among them BMG, Biddulph, Andante, Naxos – as well as his own Marston label, which he and his business partner, Scott Kessler, launched in 1996 (www.marstonrecords.com). Pianists and singers dominate his current releases, including volume eight of “The Complete Josef Hofmann,” volume one of “The Complete Leopold Godowsky,” and “Mary Lewis: The Golden Haired Soprano,” documenting the career of an overshadowed American charmer who died prematurely in 1941. In sound restoration, the most important issues are basic ones. “The digit process can do miracles, but not unless you get the good basic sound, so before you start you make sure you have the best obtainable source. I will us as many as four, five, or six copies of an original. I often use not only individual disks from different sets, but a portion of a disc from one set then go back to another disc for the rest of the side. You have to do a lot of tricky maneuvering.” Because early clockwork recording machinery was variable, not all 78s played at exactly at 78 rpm and playing back pitch can vary from recording to recording. Old shellac produced its own surface noise, but digitally removing too much in transferring is like over-cleaning an old master painting until you lose detail. Judicious restraint is the operative term, lest the music emerge unfocused. Prior to digital remastering, transfers of 78s would be laid onto magnetic tape and literally edited by cutting and splicing. Digital technology has replaced tape with mouse-driven computer screens, a great boon for most, but one that poses technical problems for Mr. Marston — he has been blind since birth. “In the analog days I could spice tape as easily as any sighted engineer,” he says. “Now I sometimes hire an assistant to do the hand work for me, but a few software companies are beginning to make products more manageable for blind users.” Sound restoration is as competitive as any profession, but Mr. Marston regards his leading colleagues as friends rather than rivals. “It’s hard to say what distinguishes my transfer work from that of Seth {Winner} or mark [Obert-Thorn] or from Brian Cripp or Roger Beardsley in England. We each have our own platonic ideal of what a transfer should sound like.” When not immersed in the world of historic sound, Mr. Marston also maintains a parallel career as a professional jazz pianist and band leader, something he has done since high school. He filled in on occasion for Bobby Short at the Café Carlyle, and has performed in venues around the world, including a White House dinner-dance during the Reagan years. Noting that he no longer plays classical piano, Mr. Marston cites jazz greats like Art Tatum and Nat King Cole, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans and Erroll Garner as important influences. “So, if I feel I am becoming stale in one profession, the other rejuvenates me.” © Copyright 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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