Teri Noel Towe brings enthusiasm and erudition to Columbia and Princeton university radio stations
ENLARGE
Teri Noel Towe has been broadcasting on Princeton University’s radio station, WPRB, since his undergraduate days there in the late ’60s. And while he didn’t attend Columbia University, he’s been participating in its radio station’s, WKCR, annual 10-day BachFest since 1977.
That might just make him America’s oldest college DJ.
“I didn’t know what it meant to be passionate about a work until running into Teri,” explained Stepan Atamian, a 22-year-old senior at Columbia and Mr. Towe’s BachFest co-host, when I dropped by the station a few days before Christmas.
They were broadcasting a performance of Bach’s “B Minor Mass,” recorded in Moscow by the Robert Shaw Chorale in 1962 during a goodwill tour of the Soviet Union.
I should say at the outset that Teri Towe, 67, isn’t an effortless interview. Not because he’s shy or self-effacing, but because he’s a veritable geyser of enthusiasm and erudition.
The answer to a straightforward question—How did you first come to find yourself in front of Columbia University’s microphones? When did you discover your passion for Johann Sebastian Bach?—might be proceeded by half an hour of stories and anecdotes, all of them excellent and many of them relevant.
For example, as to Mr. Towe’s early exposure to music: As a five year old, Mr. Towe, who was living with his family at the Waldorf Towers, regularly sneaked away from his governess to hear Cole Porter, a 30-year resident of the hotel, on his Steinway.
ENLARGE“I slipped the leash to hear Cole Porter play,” he remembered. “Mr. Porter, bless his heart, would see [Mr. Towe’s governess] coming into the room and say, ‘Teri, hide under the piano.’”
Mr. Towe attended Deerfield Academy where, when classmates were getting into whatever mischief teenage preppies are prone to, he was discovering classical music on stations such as WQXR and WNYC.
And, just as important, he was discovering the free form magic of radio in the days when classical music hosts, such as WNCN’s William Watson, had strong, idiosyncratic points of view about their playlists and were unafraid to express them.
Though I don’t want to give the impression that Mr. Towe was, or is, some sort of hothouse flower.
Rabelaisian might better describe him.
At lunch after the broadcast at the Le Veau d’Or, one of his favorite restaurants, he acknowledged a “drinking problem.” Then he paused a couple of beats before continuing: “The price of Tanqueray is going up.”
While he manages admirably to stay within the lines while on the air, much of what he says when his microphone is turned off, particularly regarding the current state of classical music radio programming, is unprintable.
Such as when he launched into a highly amusing diatribe about “the perfect sphincters out in California who developed that tightly programmed type of commercial radio. Originality need not apply.”
Mr. Towe seems never to have stopped broadcasting after college, at least not for long. He continued to do so while in law school at the University of Virginia and then as a young lawyer in Manhattan, landing a gig at WBAI, the progressive radio station. There he adopted the on-air pseudonym of the “Laughing Cavalier,” after a Frans Hals portrait that bears more than a passing resemblance, in both appearance and life-affirming spirit, to the mustachioed and bearded DJ.
While Bach’s “B Minor Mass” played, a call came into the station from a musician who told Mr. Atamian that he’d been scheduled to play on that 1962 goodwill tour but that contractual obligations got in the way.
“Stepan will not only give you the vocal soloists as appeared in the Mass,” Mr. Towe told his audience during a pause. “But also thanks to a telephone call that we received during the performance, we’re going to be able to identify a couple of the instrumentalists.”
Mr. Towe graciously handed off the baton to his co-host, and perhaps also a tradition of classical music broadcasting that, because of Teri Towe, and despite the best efforts of those unmentionable programming corporate suits, may persist among the college students who have worked alongside him for at least one more generation.