In an article coinciding with the May 2024 launch of Maurice and I, a documentary film on the partnership of Sir Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney and the saving of the Christchurch Town Hall, Sir Harold Marshall is described as the film’s “break-out star”. Marshall, who died on 31 August 2024, two weeks short of his 93rd birthday, played a role in the success of the building every bit as critical as that of its architects. His theory of lateral sound reflection, developed in conjunction with the project, initiated a paradigm shift in the acoustics of concert hall design around the world.

Marshall, then a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland’s School of Architecture, was the acoustic consultant for the town hall design competition in 1965. By 1966, when the finalists’ plans arrived in the post, he was enrolled for a PhD in acoustics at Southampton University in the United Kingdom. However, none of the short-listed competition entries conformed to the traditional European model of concert hall design on which current acoustic assessment criteria were based. Nineteenth-century concert halls such as Vienna’s Musikverein and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw possessed excellent acoustics and were models for New Zealand’s early 20th-century town halls in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin. Marshall’s challenge was to identify a design that would combine architectural and acoustic excellence but he realised that existing analytical tools were inadequate.

Marshall’s eureka moment came during a concert in the Royal Festival Hall in London. Built for the Festival of Britain in 1951, it was much wider than traditional concert halls and he realised that its problematic acoustic resulted from the absence of fractionally delayed sound reflections coming from the side walls to enrich the sound emanating directly from the stage. Recognising the architectural excellence of Warren and Mahoney’s entry, he also saw its acoustic potential. The sound reflectors that were part of their elliptical auditorium design could be tuned to achieve sound quality comparable to that of traditional auditoria. He later observed that the architectural quality of their design was such that he was determined to make it work acoustically.

Following his firm’s appointment, Warren travelled to Europe to inspect concert halls and joined Marshall in attending performances of Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation, in the Festival Hall and the Concertgebouw on successive evenings. The experience convinced Warren of the importance of lateral sound reflections and initiated the cooperative and harmonious working relationship between architects and acoustician that ensured the project’s success.

Having completed his PhD and further refined his theories on concert hall design in consultation with acousticians in Germany, Marshall took up a position at The University of Western Australia. There, in collaboration with Mike Barron, he modelled the acoustics of the Christchurch auditorium using an ex-NASA computer, the first time such advanced technology had been used in concert hall design.

The opening of the Christchurch Town Hall in September 1972 was a triumph for the design team, none of whom had designed a major auditorium before and all of whom were in their early thirties when the project began. The acoustics of the auditorium combined a full-bodied, resonant sound with a level of clarity previously thought unobtainable in halls of that configuration. Since its opening, the auditorium has been admired by musicians as diverse as conductor Leonard Bernstein, baritone Sir Bryn Terfel and singer-guitarist Carlos Santana.

Arthur Harold Marshall was born in Auckland on 15 September 1931. He attended King’s College, where he sang in the chapel choir, the beginning of a lifelong involvement in choral performance. He followed his father in becoming an architect, completing a Bachelor of Architecture at Auckland University College in 1956 along with a BSc in Physics. Following time overseas and a brief period practising architecture in Auckland, he was appointed to a senior lectureship in architectural technology at the Auckland School of Architecture in 1961.

He returned there as a professor of architecture in 1973. The acoustic research laboratory he led achieved an international reputation. Professor Deidre Brown, a former student, remembers him “as a highly engaging teacher [who] drew all of us into the world of sound transmission and how important this was for intelligibility and the appreciation of music”, also noting that he always stressed the aesthetic dimension of architecture. As a trained architect, Marshall was able to collaborate with his peers on equal terms; a hallmark of his acoustic designs is that they are seamlessly integrated with the architecture of the space.

From 1981, in partnership with Christopher Day, he established Marshall Day Acoustics, now one of the world’s most respected and sought-after acoustic consultancies, with more than 100 staff in offices across Australasia, in China and in France. The firm’s reputation was built on the innovations Marshall introduced in Christchurch and subsequently shared in over 200 scientific publications. It was consolidated by the success of concert halls around the world, including the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, Perth Concert Hall, and Segerstrom Hall, Orange County, California. Marshall’s standing was such that he collaborated with some of the world’s most celebrated architects, including the Iranian-British architect Zaha Hadid at the Guangzhou Opera House, China, a project that presented particular challenges on account of the asymmetrical design of the hall. His career culminated with the Philharmonie de Paris, designed with renowned French architect, Jean Nouvel. A 2015 profile in Le Figaro characterised Marshall as “a magician in sound” and a “star of world acoustics”. At its opening, the Philharmonie was described as having “dazzling clarity and generous depth of sound that… [is] like a vivid, physical presence”. It was, concluded The Guardian’s music critic, possibly the most exciting place to hear music in the world.

The Philharmonie was Marshall’s swansong but, in 2015, the future of the Christchurch Town Hall remained uncertain. Along with Miles Warren, Maurice Mahoney and Christchurch citizens, he campaigned to save it, submitting to the Christchurch City Council in person and rallying the international acoustics community to petition the city to save it. He had the satisfaction of cutting the ribbon alongside his old friend, Sir Miles Warren, on its reopening in February 2019.

Marshall was no dry technocrat; he was fascinated by the intersection between metrics and metaphysics, the point where rational analysis ended and the senses and emotions took over in the perception of sound. He defined the special acoustic quality of a space as ‘presence’. Speaking on camera for Maurice and I, he enlarged on this idea. “The sense of presence is a gift; it’s of the same family as grace and love — none of those can be engineered.”

Harold Marshall was a dedicated family man. He was devoted to Shirley (nee Lindsey), his wife of 60 years who predeceased him in 2016. They had four sons and family life revolved around a wide range of enthusiasms, including sailing and fishing. The Mount Albert Methodist Church was also central to his life. Following his retirement from the University of Auckland in 1998, he spent seven years in Southland in a horticulture venture growing hydrangeas. Continuing demands for his acoustical expertise brought him home to Auckland, from where he worked on the high-profile projects that culminated in the Philharmonie de Paris.

Marshall’s family connections to Mount Albert dated to the early 20th century and, in his late eighties, he became involved with the campaign to preserve the mature exotic trees on Ōwairaka Mount Albert, becoming a patron of the group, Honour the Maunga. His wise counsel and dedication to the cause gained him recognition as a kaumātua. The trees still stand. His endless curiosity about the natural world was complemented by his engagement with the arts; he wrote poetry, painted watercolours and sang in choirs throughout his long life.

Few New Zealanders have made greater contributions to their chosen fields than has Harold Marshall. He was knighted for services to acoustics in 2009 and received many prestigious awards, including the Wallace Clement Sabine Medal (Acoustical Society of America, 1995) and the Rayleigh Medal (United Kingdom Institute of Acoustics, 2015). His realisation of the importance of lateral sound reflections in concert hall design, modelled at full scale in the Christchurch Town Hall auditorium, conclusively demonstrated that acoustic excellence could be achieved in concert halls that broke with traditional models. In doing so, he helped liberate future concert halls from the straight-jacket of 19th-century solutions. Musicians and audiences around the world are the ongoing beneficiaries of his dedication to both the science and the art of acoustics.

Sources:

 ^{Chris Day; John Marshall; Harold Marshall, Korowai of Life and Love, (privately printed, 2022); Ian Lochhead (ed.) The Christchurch Town Hall 1965–2019: A Dream Renewed (Canterbury University Press, 2019); Professor Deidre Brown.}