Robert J. Lurtsema, region's 'Pro Musica' host, does at 68
   By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff, 6/14/2000

   Robert J. Lurtsema, whose subterranean tones and pregnant pauses
   made him a New England institution as host of WGBH-FM's "Morning
   Pro Musica" for almost three decades, died Monday.  At his family's
   request, the location was not disclosed.  The cause of death was
   idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.  He was 68.

   Mr. Lurtsema was "a giant in our industry," said WGBH Radio manager
   Marita Rivero in a prepared statement.  "He set the industry standard
   for classical music programs."

   John Harbison, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, noted that Mr.
   Lurtsema stood out in a radio environment where individual taste and
   commitment to music are increasingly made to defer to homogenized
   programming.

   "Morning Pro Musica," Harbison said yesterday, "was one of the last
   bastions of playing complete, challenging pieces from beginning to
   end.  We'll miss him."

   Universally known as "Robert J.," Mr. Lurtsema made his WGBH debut
   in 1971.  He had as many as a half-million listeners, and "Morning
   Pro Musica" was broadcast on stations throughout the region and
   upstate New York.

   "Bob had a personality and a style all his own," Michael Steinberg,
   the recently retired program annotator for the San Francisco Symphony
   and New York Philharmonic, said yesterday.  "It invited parody, that
   extreme slowness and those long pauses between words, but it worked
   perfectly for him, and he was loved and admired more than any other
   classical disc jockey in the country."

   Mr. Lurtsema, who was on the air seven days a week until 1993,
   when he cut back to just weekends, opened his show with bird song.
   It was but one of the many distinctive touches that won him such a
   large and devoted following.  Another was his serving as his own
   newscaster.  (He threatened to quit in 1980 when WGBH tried inserting
   hourly National Public Radio news feeds into his broadcast.) The
   words "edited and read by your `Morning Pro Musica' host, Robert J.
   Lurtsema," became in some households as familiar a New England
   catchphrase as "from Eastport to Block Island."

   Hearing the news read in Mr. Lurtsema's magisterial tones - The New
   York Times once described his voice as having "the texture of warm
   fudge" - was a unique experience.  Indeed, a listener once wrote him,
   "If the end of the world were coming, I'd want to hear it from you.
   I can hear you saying, `Well, there has been an announcement that
   the world will end in 28 minutes.  That gives us just enough time to
   hear Telemann's Sonata in F for Recorder, Oboe and Continuo."

   Mr. Lurtsema did not lack for detractors, who could find his announcing
   style pretentious, labored, mannered, or all three.  Many listeners
   found his fondness for pauses especially off-putting.

   "I'm not afraid of dead air," Mr. Lurtsema countered.  "I don't
   think there's anything wrong with a quiet spot once in a while.  When
   I pause I'm visualizing my audience, the person I'm speaking to.  I
   always imagine I'm speaking to someone in particular."

   That approach helped listeners develop the sense of a personal
   relationship with Mr. Lurtsema, as did his many broadcasting quirks.
   He once devoted 15 minutes to reading Mao Tse-tung's obituary.  In
   1989, he took a two-month leave of absence to bone up on his German.
   On the Saturday closest to his birthday, Nov.  14, he would play a
   program of personal favorites, such as Schubert's "Trout" Quintet.

   "He had this subtle flamboyance," Charles Laquidara of WZLX-FM said
   yesterday.  Laquidara, who started in radio as a classical music
   announcer before switching to rock, recalled how "Robert J. pronounced
   all the names better than I did.  But he was also a guy who could
   talk to me, a kid from Milford.  Even though he had that supreme
   confidence on the air, it was never pompous.  I felt like we could
   sit in a bar and have a beer.  The man was just one of a kind."

   Born in Cambridge, Robert John Lurtsema grew up in a family he once
   described as being "as unmusical as a family can be." The first
   classical piece he could recall hearing was "Cloudburst," from Ferd
   Grofe's "Grand Canyon Suite." "That is about as graphic and approachable
   as a classical work can be," Mr. Lurtsema once said.  "I was completely
   taken." He began taking piano lessons at the Roxbury Boys Club and
   attending concerts.

   A graduate of English High School, Mr. Lurtsema spent four years in
   the Navy, where his duties included running a 200-watt radio station
   in Morocco.

   He graduated from Boston University in 1957 and over the next decade
   held a truly impressive array of jobs: lumberjack, construction
   worker, trapeze artist, carpenter, encyclopedia salesman, diving
   instructor, commercial artist, and for five years presided over a
   folk music program on WCRB.  He lived in New York for three years,
   working in advertising and publishing, and managed a national chain
   of teenage discotheques, the Hullabaloo Clubs.

   In 1968, he returned to Boston and took up painting.  He was in his
   studio one day when he heard a WGBH announcer misidentify a Mozart
   composition.  Phoning in a correction, Mr. Lurtsema was informed
   there was an opening for a weekend classical music announcer.  He
   got the job and began at the station in June 1971.  Asked to switch
   to a Monday-Friday schedule, Mr. Lurtsema proposed he handle the
   announcing chores for all seven mornings.  He thrived on the resulting
   70-hour work week.

   Mr. Lurtsema would generally take five hours to prepare each five-hour
   program, doing the scheduling three months in advance.  He tended to
   program the early hours chronologically, with music of the medieval,
   Baroque, and Classical eras predominating ("Nothing too jarring before
   9 a.m.," he liked to say).  He would key his programming to composers'
   birthdays, holidays, historical events, the change of seasons, and
   the like.  Sunday mornings he would broadcast a Bach cantata and he
   delighted in programming various musical cycles - each of Haydn's
   symphonies, say, or the complete works of Mozart played in the order
   of their composition.

   Live performances and interviews were an important part of "Morning
   Pro Musica." Aaron Copland, Nadia Boulanger, John Cage, Yehudi Menuhin,
   Itzhak Perlman, and Isaac Stern - to name but a few - all paid visits
   to Mr. Lurtsema's studio.

   Shortish, stout, and balding, Mr. Lurtsema cut a distinctive figure
   off the air.  He was a dedicated citizen of the local cultural world,
   serving on the boards of numerous institutions and frequently appearing
   with various performing arts groups, ranging from the Boston Symphony
   to the Paul Winter Consort.  He narrated documentaries and did
   voice-overs for PBS promotions and commercials.  In addition to his
   painting, he composed and wrote.  His bassoon quartet was adapted
   for the theme of "Julia Child and Company."

   Mr. Lurtsema published two books, "A Pocketful of Verse" and the
   "Robert J. Lurtsema Musical Quiz Book." The former got Mr. Lurtsema
   into trouble last year when he was accused of having plagiarized
   there a poem by Don Marquis (Mr. Lurtsema apologized, saying the
   attribution was inadvertent).

   Mr. Lurtsema leaves his companion, Betsy Northrup, of Wellesley;
   his mother, Dorothy, of Stoughton; two sisters, Jacqueline MacLennan,
   of Raynham, and Loraine, of Tucson; and a brother, David, of Tucson.

   Funeral plans are incomplete.

   This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 6/14/2000.
   Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.

Mimi Ezust