Witness to History: Ward Marston on the Orchestra’s Recording Legacy

Above: Music Director Leopold Stokowski and the Orchestra during a recording session in the Academy of Music

By Judith Kurnick

Some people make history; others study history; and still others uncover history. Ward Marston has done all three. He’s the recording engineer whose passion and skill restored the earliest recordings of Leopold Stokowski and The Philadelphia Orchestra so they could be heard by a modern public. In the course of that work, Marston discovered a long-forgotten treasure.

A LOVE OF THE “PHILADELPHIA SOUND”

A jazz pianist and band leader whose eponymous Ward Marston Orchestra was a frequent presence at the Academy of Music Anniversary Ball and other social events over the last half century, he fell in love with The Philadelphia Orchestra at a very young age. “In my childhood, I was taken to a lot of Philadelphia Orchestra concerts, and I always wanted to hear the guest conductors,” he recalls. “I heard Charles Munch. I heard Hermann Scherchen conduct the first time the Orchestra performed the Mahler Fifth. I remember loving Ivan Fischer.” Marston recalls hearing Wolfgang Sawallisch’s early Philadelphia performances while he was in high school. At the same time, the young man was avidly accumulating 78 RPM records. “I went to every Salvation Army and thrift shop I could, because in those days, you could find lots of old records in those places, and they would charge 10 cents a record.”

Stokowski’s recordings fascinated Marston. “There was something about the sound of the Orchestra on those old records that just consumed me,” he muses. “It felt like a window was opening. The performances were more individualistic … some people would say willful. But I found the performances really interesting.”

Marston was 15 years old in 1967 when his parents took him backstage to meet Stokowski after a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony. “He seemed interested to meet me. I don’t remember his words, but he seemed very pleased that a 15-year-old was interested in Mahler.”

While studying history at Williams College, Marston learned to remaster old recordings to play some of his collection on the college radio station. “I had managed to acquire, I would say, 98% of the recordings by Stokowski and The Philadelphia Orchestra.” Word soon got around, and in 1974, when he was just 22, Marston was invited by WHYY radio (then WUHY), to present a weekly hourlong program on Stokowski /Philadelphia Orchestra recordings from 1917 to 1940. The series lasted for 58 weeks. When Stokowski died in 1977, the station asked to rebroadcast the series as a tribute.

EXPERIMENTAL RECORDINGS

Still, it was a coup for the young man when he was contacted in 1979 by the Bell Telephone Laboratories. In the early 20th century, Bell Labs had experimented with various microphones and recording equipment, mostly recording off the radio. But Stokowski had a keen interest in innovative technology, and in 1931 it was decided that Bell Labs would come down from New York on weekends, set up their microphone or microphones above the stage and equipment in the cellar of the Academy of Music, and record any piece of music they chose. “The recordings were not made to preserve the performances,” Marston notes. “They were simply made as experiments to try out different kinds of equipment, putting the microphones at various distances from the orchestra and that sort of thing. They were completely for their internal use.” And there was no way to play them back.

These experimental discs were stored in the basement archive at Bell Labs and forgotten. In the late 1970s, Bell Labs leaders were alerted to their existence and decided to issue two long-playing records to highlight and commemorate the work. They were told by Stokowski’s former personal assistant to call Ward Marston.

“What makes these recordings fascinating,” he explains, “is that many of them are way ahead of where the technology was for commercial recording at the time. So, if you compare recordings that [RCA] Victor was making of the Orchestra and then you play these Bell Labs records, the Bell Labs records are so much more high fidelity.”

“We don’t have whole performances, but for example, there’s a few minutes of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. There’s a good chunk of Pictures at an Exhibition in the Ravel orchestration. There’s also a good half of Scriabin’s [Prometheus, the] Poem of Fire, which is fascinating. There’s almost an entire concert including Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which they managed to get because of overlaps between the Friday afternoon and the Saturday night concert.”

Marston recalls that several musicians from the Orchestra came to his home to hear some of the recovered material. Among them was Assistant Conductor William Smith. “I played this Roman Carnival Overture, and they were all in absolute ecstasy over it.”

A REMARKABLE DISCOVERY

Marston worked closely with Arthur Keller, then in his 80s, who had been the lead engineer at the experimental recording sessions. Marston brought home cartons of discs to separate those that could be used from the many that were problematic.

“I put the stylus down on the first disc of Pictures at an Exhibition. I heard the beginning, and it ended in about four minutes; it was over. And then I slid the stylus and noticed there was another set of grooves. I thought it might be a continuation, or they might have stopped and started again somewhere else in the piece. When I put the stylus down, I heard the same passage, only I could tell that it sounded different somehow. It was like the emphasis was on a different part of the orchestra. Well, it was a eureka moment for me. It was like, oh, my God, this must be stereo.”

Marston had uncovered the first stereo recording of any symphony orchestra.

He went to Keller. “Well, of course we did those recordings,” Keller recalled. “We didn’t call them stereo; we called them binaural. But it’s been 50 years.”

PRESERVING PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA RECORDINGS

With all this experience, it’s no surprise that The Philadelphia Orchestra asked Marston to participate in the selection and remastering of recordings for its Centennial box set, released in 1999. “I suggested to the committee that they include the Beethoven Fifth from the Bell Labs 1931 recordings because that had not been on either of those LPs that we produced in the ’70s.”

Now in his 70s, Marston is still producing remastered recordings on his own label, Marston Records, with his partner Scott Kessler. But, like a conductor, he hopes to have another go at those Stokowski recordings. “I would love to do the same recordings, 50 years later, and hopefully do them better than I did when I was 22.”