Robert J. Lurtsema: On the Radio (Nov. 6, 1980)
For our Leisure magazine, I headed into Boston for an interview with one of my radio heroes, Robert J. Lurtsema when his daily classical music to do a program aired over WFCR, was a favorite here and across the country. Lurtsema, with a uniquely comfortable, knowledgeable delivery, was known for his quirkiness. So it shouldn’t have surprised me during the interview when our conversation, while his recordings played, caused him to miss his “on-air” cue.
“Damn it!” he said. And then, he returned to his bewildered listeners: “I should never agree to interviews when I’m doing a program!”
He’s been called “offbeat … quirky … the most creative newscaster in America.”
But Robert J. Lurtsema, the inimitable host of National Public most aptly described by the simple birds’ song that opens his seven-day-a-week classical music program.
Listening to Lurtsema is sipping a cup of mellow wine.
His voice is smooth, yet hardly the silver-throated clarity that oozes from some “easy-listening” announcers.
Lurtsema himself is far less smooth, breaking all canons of radio announcing.
He shrugs off one writer’ s’ labeling him “a culture cult figure,” preferring what another has dubbed “the cult of calm.”
Lurtsema is so low-key that, in the words of one writer, he “seems to be swaying on the edge of a coma.
But at 7 a.m., when Lurtsema begins his five-hour broadcast from WGBH in Boston, he sounds more like a bathrobed overnight house guest you’ve stumbled upon in your hallway, saluting with a groggy “good morning.”
Lurtsema, 48, is short, stocky and bald, with wispy, bushy white sideburns.
A little ornery, a bit sarcastic, the soft-spoken sultan of the classical airwaves -perches on his orange swivel throne in cramped Studio 4.
Sporting black sandals with black socks, black pants and a blue shirt, the sultan chainsmokes and sips coffee from an oversized black pottery mug with fern imprints.
But he is busy, engineering his own program, with records selected from the station’s 35,00-record library, and keeping logs of what he airs.
Lurtsema is dedicated to his music and his listeners, and if management or media attention get in the way, he becomes a bit feisty.
“If I seem somewhat cynical, I am,” he admits.
Robert J. as devotees refer to him — grumbles about lingering media attention to a three-month battle in which Lurtsema lovers lobbied to have the network reinstate his unique newscasts.
A network study, Lurtsema explains, “says everybody instantly upon waking wants to know the grim details of every story that’s happening everywhere.”
He disagreed, and loyal fans swamped the station with 3,000 letters backing Lurtsema’s anti-climatic newscasts instead of those of a more professional-sounding newscaster.. Three months after his newscasts had been taken off the air, the station threw in the towel.
“When listeners wake up,” says Lurtsema, “they want to know the world is still here The news has to be there, but the music is paramount.
Obviously if a listener is looking for the latest coverage of fires, muggings, rapes, stabbings, he’s looking to the wrong source,” because I virtually eliminate it.” Sometimes, in fact, Lurtsema skips the news altogether because he believes nothing that day is newsworthy.
“If the show has a calming influence,” he reflects, “that’s good.”
Lurtsema is so low-key that, in the words of one writer, he “seems to be swaying on the edge of a coma.
Unlike most well-prepared announcers, Lurtsema takes time for pensiveness, exhaling slowly and repeatedly pausing long enough to make you wonder whether he has indeed gone into a coma.
“Sometimes 1 sound to people as if I’m making the news up as I go along,” says Lurtsema, who wakes at 5:30, drives in from Wellesley by 6:30, makes a pot of coffee and reads through the night’s wire copy, The Times, The Globe, The Herald and The Wall Street Journal.
“Sometimes I read stories exactly as they come off the wire, they’re the way I would have written them myself. Sometimes I put them in my own words. An exact word comes up and I can’t think of it. How long can you sit there and wait for the word to come up without substituting a weaker word?”
Regular listeners have learned the virtue of patience. He who hesitates is worth it.
But, as Lurtsema stresses, Morning Pro Musica is “first and foremost a program of music…a program about music and the people who make the music.”
There are live interviews, live performances and often tributes to specific composers and performers.
Lurtsema wants the program not only to enlighten and entertain listeners who know about concert music, but also those who don’t.
He often combines traditional, folk and popular music from foreign countries, set around their national holidays.
“Radio has always been something I could fall back on when I needed money,” says Boston-born and-reared Lurtsema. “It was always one way to pay the milk bills.”
Lurtsema, who had worked for several; years on Boston’s WCRB and for a New York City advertising agency and radio station, was painting full-time in 1971 when he telephoned WGBH one weekend to correct something he’d heard on the air.
The announcer was taped, but the engineer tipped him off that a weekend announcing job was available.
Four months after taking the job, Lurtsema was asked to work weekdays instead. He protested, believing the program needed the continuity of one person planning and announcing seven days a week.
He’s been on ever since.
Lurtsema does a skeleton outline of his programs a year in advance, then fleshes it out three months before it goes on the air.
In July, ‘Morning Pro Musica” which had been carried over a half dozen public radio stations in New York and New England, went nationwide. But the syndication leaves Robert J. cold.
Lurtsema, who says disgustedly that he has no idea how many stations air the program, feels a strong need to relate to the audience — something nationwide syndication impedes.
One reason is that West Coast listeners pick up only the last three hours of the program, at 6 a.m their time.
“I plan the program in a chronological way. I’m saving 20th century compositions for the last hour when the listeners are more awake. For many people, that hour is the first thing they’re going to hear. If they have something that’s modern, complex, dissonant, that’s wrong. But I just keep doing what I have to. If they want to take the program, fine.”
At 11:39, Lurtsema looks at the digital clock in front of him and reflects on his future in radio.
“There are 21 minutes I’m sure of. Beyond that, I’m not.”
If he left the program, as he has threatened on occasion to do, “I would not go back to work in radio.
There are too many things that are less frustrating and that certainly are more financially rewarding.” Lurtsema, who studied meteorology and later media and journalism at Boston University, sleeps only four or five hours a night.
“That leaves me time to squeeze in more activities than most people get involved with,” he explains. “There’s never been any time in my life when I just did one thing. Nothing held my interest sufficiently.
“I never had a formal course in music until I started at the New England Conservatory. I got to the point where I realized there were a great many things I only had a sketchy knowledge of, or none at all.
He reminisces fondly about his days in theatre — where he would like to do more — and less romantically about his sculpting.
There are “spin-off projects from radio: a book of interviews with performers and composers, a recording of Christmas and Chanukah stories, a record on loons.
He studies composition at conservatory, and wants to do more composition. He also paints — mostly dawnscapes.
“Dawn is something I’ve become intimately familiar with,” he said.
Yet Lurtsema’s best-known dawnscape is Morning Pro Musica itself.
‘Every day there is that blank canvas on which to paint a five-hour program. Some days there’s a lot of wasted paint. Some days it’s a masterpiece. The negative side is that radio is an ephemeral medium,” he muses.
“The program goes on, it goes off. It’s not like you know when you finish a painting, that it’s a good work, it has some merit, it has some lasting value.” What does endure are the birds, which softly herald the program’s opening each morning, chirping a few minutes alone and then in the background as the theme music and host come on.
Lurtsema had heard a chickadee as he was leaving for work one day and decided to open the program with the chirping. It grew day-by-day and has become a ritual for thousands of morning radio listeners.
The culmination occurred last year, when Lurtsema hung micro- phones in the trees during live broadcasts from Tanglewood.
And it all came home to roost recently in a little girl’s question to Lurtsema:
“How do you get the birds to stop?” asked the girl, who’d imagined a row of birds singing in what is Studio 4.
“I have very obedient birds,” he replied simply.
— RICHIE DAVIS