Oh God, My God, I Left my Key to Heaven at Home
By Teri Noel Towe
[aka “TNT” or Teri “The Animal” Towe]
The late 60’s were a Golden Age for classical music at the station. WPRB was blessed with a string of committed and sensitive Classical Music Directors: Jeff Schaefer, Hal Abelson, Greg Petsko, and Alan Konefsky. I myself had the pleasure of serving in that capacity for a year and a half. The Classical Department had four hours every weekday evening (7 to 11) and several hours on Sunday afternoon. As a record collector and classical music nut, I found at WPRB the perfect forum for the grinding of my personal axes. For two years (my junior and senior years), I did two shows a week (Tuesday and Thursday evenings). In addition to series devoted to all the recordings of the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska and the cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, I regularly presented “The Age of Shellac”, a series devoted to historic 78 RPM recordings, which I transferred to tape on my own equipment in my dorm room, first in ’41 Hall, and then in ’03.
Each year the Station’s powers that were graciously allowed me to celebrate the birthdays of my two favorite composers- Bach and Handel – with twelve hour overnight marathons. And then there were the Hallowe’en and April Fool shows, rarefied insanities that either tried the listeners’ patience to the limit or tickled their classical music funny bones. Robert Golenbock, ’69, and Gregg Lange, ’70, were my patient and long suffering partners in crime and my straight men for these crazy escapades, and original recordings were made not only by Robert Golenbock (the nimble pianistic fingers for “Keybored Immorals Play Again in Scareo”, a satire on a syndicated programme that the station was airing at the time) but also by Stan Scordilis, Tom Williams, and Mike Cone, all of the class of ’69.
It was Stan who patiently recorded the performances purportedly played on the historic Lemuel Gulliver organ in the Church of All Hallows the Least in Lilliput. The joke required the recording of the pieces at half tempo on the highest pitched stops of the organ. The resulting tapes were then played at twice the speed at which they had been recorded. And I shall always be grateful to William H. Scheide, ’36, who provided the title for the fake Bach Cantata that I “discovered”. The title “Ach, Gott, mein Gott, ich habe meinen Himmelschlüssel zu Hause gelassen” (Oh God, my God, I left my key to Heaven at home) was a hell of a lot better than the piece I created. I also suspect that there are a few listeners who are still vainly trying to forget Sir Cuthbert Smitherington-Quince and Jean-Philippe Duc de Fromage-Roquefort, the two Baroque composers whose messterpieces I resolutely and regularly rescued from oblivion. In looking back on these shows (and in listening to the airchecks), I am amazed that I wasn’t either arrested or committed.
Because of the contacts I painstakingly nurtured at the various classical record companies, I had the pleasure of premièring numerous new recordings. Some of the most important and most popular classical discs issued in the late ‘60s were first heard by ‘PRB audiences. Among them were The Well Tempered Synthesizer (the sequel to Switched-on Bach) and Pablo Casals’s recording of the Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn.
I frequently did interview shows, either live or taped, with prominent concert artists and musicologists. Among those who appeared on my programme were the composer Roger Sessions, the organist Carl Weinrich, the discographer and critic David Hall, and perhaps most importantly, the pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski, then the last active pupil of the great 19th century pedagogue Leschetizky. Bill Scheide visited twice a year for a Bach cantata evening. During the spring of my senior year, Bill made available private recordings of the Bach Aria Group, which he had founded and directed. Thanks to his generosity, ‘PRB had the world broadcast premières of several Bach cantatas that were not available on commercial recordings in those days and the honor of airing private recordings of Bach cantatas and arias made by such distinguished singers as Erna Berger, Marian Anderson, Cesare Siepi, and Jennie Tourel. In addition, there were interviews with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the pianist Robert Casadesus that, because of scheduling changes compelled by the campus unrest after the Kent State Tragedy in May, 1970, were never aired.
Some of these tapes, all of which are now on deposit at the Rodgers and Hammerstein Sound Archives in Lincoln Center, have proven invaluable, as it happens, to musicologists. For example, in the interview with Casadesus, it came out that, at the composer’s request, he and not Maurice Ravel recorded the lion’s share of the piano rolls that bear Ravel’s signature and that have appeared on long playing records as examples of his art. That information is available nowhere else. And Hoszowski’s reminiscences and evaluations of Busoni, Paderewski, Enesco, and their recordings are also of great historical importance.
Still, the bomb scare in May of 1970 may well be the event that is most memorable in the minds of those who might actually think back on my days as a classical music DJ at WPRB. That, at least, made The Daily Princetonian. John Bongiovanni, ’70, was also in the control room when the call came in. I remember it vividly. It came in during an installment of “The Recordings of Pablo Casals”.
“There is a bomb in the Coke machine at WPRB, and it will go off in 20 minutes”, the obviously disguised male voice said.
Certain that the call was a prank, since my outspoken views about the cancellation of finals and comprehensive exams were by no means popular, I courteously thanked the caller and hung up. Bongo asked what the call was about. I told him. Quite rightly, he notified the proctors, who, understandably, evacuated Holder Hall. I, however, declined to leave, and Bongo chose to stay in the studios with me. First of all, if it had not been a prank, there was a three foot wall between us and the bomb, and we would have had to have walked past the Coke machine when leaving the station. Furthermore, if the fecal matter had collided with the ventilation system that night, we could have escaped through the basement window behind the control room. Bongo and I sat it out. I will always remember that, during the bomb scare, I played the Karl Engel, Sandor Vegh, Pablo Casals recording of Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D, Op. 70, No. 1. The work is commonly known by the nickname, “The Ghost Trio”.