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.