The difference a voice makes [op-ed CCT 5 July 2000]

If I could start this with a few minutes of birds singing I would. Robert J. Lurtsema, host of National Public Radio’s “Morning Pro Musica,” died last month. And the world will not be the same because of how he lived in it.

Yeah, I know, everybody changes the world in one way or another. With the politicians and generals and CEOs, the movers and shakers, it’s easy to see the big effects they create: a far-off nation is bombed, an interest rate changes and a Wall Street index jumps like a seismograph needle.

But to most who knew him, Robert J. (as we took liberties with his name) was only a voice. And what’s in a voice? How does a radio announcer transform the world?

Robert J. had a deep rich voice, as has been often remarked. But it was not so much that unique texture or timbre—voiceprints are all unique, I’m told—as h ow he used it as an instrument to tweak our expectations of that hackneyed self-parody of a field, the the classical music program with its unctuous, museum-like narrative.

One of Robert J.’s trademark innovations was a decision not to use his voice. Instead of starting the program with the usual sort of voiced introduction, or even with music, which itself have been innovative, he eased into things with an indefinite session of birdsong.

What an idea—letting nature introduce art, cardinals and thrushes and song sparrows open for Mozart or Bach.

And then, all in good time, would come the seque of lilting, spring-like music—I never got the name of the piece—softly at first, then seeming to get closer, like the first human up and about in the morning, maybe a faun skipping toward us through a meadow. Robert J., of course, coming to lead us on the morning’s meander through the music.

But not before setting a certain tone for the day with his own story of the news. He insisted on editing and reading it himself, instead of an official news pro, preferring not to segregate the arts from the real world.

The words never deviated from journalistic objectivity, but the voice—the darkening and lightening, the pregnant pauses—said worlds about our world. The most lasting impression is of profound deliberateness. Nothing was glossed over. Anything worth saying at all was worth giving its proper emphasis. Here was a human being to guide us not only through the fields of music but the day’s main events.

Robert J. would also do the weather. It would often enough annoy me (with my emotional dependence on warm temperatures and bright skies), that voice, by seeming perversely to lend energy to the nastiness of typical New England weather: yes, cold rain this morning, all day, most probably tomorrow and into the forecastable future. No false hope here, no obligatory hint at light at the end of the tunnel. But also in the rendering of that forecast the implication that if the sun never shone again, we would, with our host and musical selections, muddle through. The human spirit does not, finally, depend on the vagaries of the weather.

What’s in a voice? In this voice the simple, and yet—in this era in which flawless, glib delivery is the standard of excellence for radio announcers—radical insistence on being a real voice. He grumbled, he rumbled, he paused. (A Lurtsema pause was hardly “empty air,” but rather filled with the man puzzling something out.) In place of the typical radio “personality” without personality, here was a believable person.

Our host, while never seeming to throw his arm, in a manner of speaking, around the shoulders of musical heroes nevertheless asserted the right to inhabit the same world. He was a voice which took the music out of the museum and returned it to the light of day. In a voice, even more, or at least more intimately and viscerally than with the history-making moves of the politicians and generals, is all of life reconfigured, given another flavor, another feel.

A voice like Robert J.’s persisting over the decades in a key spot in our lives inserts a new possibility into history, a new wrinkle into the human repertoire. A new resource in the spiritual arsenal.

What’s in a voice, this voice? It comes down to this: music matters, details matter, people matter. What you do makes a difference.

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