劳拉·卡洛的弥撒之旅. 广播名人堂

二十多年前, Laura Carlo left an award-winning career in broadcast news to become the morning voice of classical music on radio station WCRB in Boston. For a time, she also hosted mornings for the World Classical Network, syndicated to sixteen U.S. cities, making her the most listened-to standalone female music announcer in America. Last fall, she was inducted into the Massachusetts 广播名人堂. 

What’s it like to be a hall of famer? It’s just a lovely, lovely recognition that actually came out of the clear blue. They don’t tell you you’re in the running. They just announce they’ve chosen you.

You didn’t start out as a music announcer. 我在新闻部门工作, 有一天, the program director at CRB called me in and said, “I wanted to tell you that you get more fan 邮件 than any of my DJs, 截止到周四, 你是我新的晨间DJ.” And I swear my answer to him was, “You are on drugs.他说：“真的吗，劳拉。? Not, ‘thank you for thinking of me to do this?’” The two of us told this story at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony. 

How does it feel to know that you can help set the tone for a listener’s day? I love that and it’s something that I take seriously. My job is to make sure that you have a wonderful launch into your day. 

Yours is an impressive track record in an industry famous for stations changing not only formats, 也有电视上的才艺. 你的秘诀是什么？? 在很大程度上, I worked for stations that were small and family owned, 他们是怎么认识你的. They gave you opportunities to try different things that you probably wouldn’t be allowed to do at the bigger stations. By being able to do so many different things, I made myself more valuable in the end.

A number of classical stations across the country have been lost over the years to other formats in the quest for higher ratings and revenue. WCRB如何保持竞争力? Right now we are the only 24/7 classical music station in Boston. We’ve always kept an eye on other classical stations that would crop up and eventually leave, but even in later years when we became the only 24/7 in town, we had to look at all forty major stations in Boston as competition. What do we have that could entice someone who has no exposure to classical? How can we get some of them to listen?

You can’t sit by and say, “Oh, we’re classical. 我们不需要这样做.“哦，不. We are not only a classical music station. 我们是广播员. We have to compete on the same level field as everybody else. So if there’s social media, we explore it. We have on-demand concerts; we have the ability for you to check every piece of music we’ve ever played; we have a free phone app. Anything that anybody else can do, we can do better.

公告风格也发生了变化. I didn’t care for the old style of stuffed-shirt announcing. And our program directors began to make the music more accessible. We started playing John Williams music scores because, guess what folks? 那其实是古典音乐. 

当你加入WCRB时, 这是一个商业电台, but it has since been acquired by a public broadcaster, specifically the WGBH Educational Foundation. We were very grateful that GBH bought us because we were seconds away from being turned into a sports talk station. We would’ve been gone as a classical format, and that would have been a shame in a city we call the Hub of the Universe. Boston needed to have an arts and culture radio station, and GBH understood that, and saved us.

你们家是个音乐世家. 你丈夫是个歌剧演员? When we got married, he was doing a lot on Broadway. Then he sang with the Metropolitan Opera for seven seasons. I was living in Boston and he was subletting in New York City. We went back and forth with buses and trains for about ten years. 

What other kinds of music does classical Laura like? 我喜欢说唱. I’m a hard rock girl and—don’t laugh—I also like heavy metal. 我什么都听. As my former general manager once said, if it’s good music, it’s good music.