Biographical Note: Lucia Dlugoszewski
Lucille (later "Lucia") Dlugoszewski was born to Polish immigrants Chester and Jennie Dlugoszewski in Detroit, Michigan, on June 16, 1925. Her father, a tool and die maker, and her mother, a lover of music and nature, likely contributed to Dlugoszewski's interests and ability in mathematics and the arts. She began studying piano at an early age at the Detroit Institute of Music. She initially chose the pre-medical program when she matriculated at Wayne State University, but her transcript shows she eventually abandoned sciences in favor of arts and languages. In 1949, she received a fellowship to study piano with Grete Sultan and music composition and theory with Edvard Varèse in New York City, where she met John Cage, who offered her mentorship and friendship during those early years.
In her earliest compositions, Dlugoszewski focused on incorporating sounds from everyday life into music. Her first work, Moving Space Theater Piece for Everyday Sounds, premiered in Detroit in 1949. In 1952, her performance of Structures for the Poetry of Everyday Sounds in New York was met with great praise among composers, including Cage. Dlugoszewski then began exploring new ways of playing the piano, such as using a variety of objects to play directly on the strings inside the instrument, a technique that she termed as the "timbre piano." This technique created a broad and diverse sound palette and became a central element in many of her instrumental works and dance scores.
Dlugoszewski began collaborating with Erick Hawkins in 1952. They were an ideal pair because of their mutual affinity for Zen Buddhism and nature, as well as a shared philosophy that the creator should not impose his or her interpretation of a work onto the listener or observer. They premiered their first work, openings of the (eye), on January 15, 1952. She composed more than 25 dance scores for Hawkins, including Early Floating (1961), Cantilever (1963), Geography of Noon (1964), Tightrope (1968), Black Lake (1969), Angels of the Inmost Heaven (1971), Avanti (1980), and Each Time You Carry Me This Way (1993).
In 1958, Dlugoszewski composed Suchness Concert, a percussion duet for which she invented more than a hundred new instruments. Sculptor and designer Ralph Dorazio, a friend from Detroit, built the instruments according to her models and drawings, and Dlugoszewski reused them in many of her other compositions. Later that same year, she premiered the first solo exhibition of her works at the jazz club The Five Spot Café. The program included Music for Small Centers (1958) and Archaic Timbre Piano Music, which was an adaptation of Here and Now, with Watchers. Dlugoszewski and Dorazio applied for a marriage license in 1950, but no evidence has been found that the wedding took place or that a divorce was recorded. Dorazio later married Dlugoszewski's childhood friend and New York roommate Mary Norton. Dlugoszewski secretly married Hawkins in Michigan in 1962; they remained together until his death in 1994.
Dlugoszewski's other collaborations included several productions for The Living Theatre, an experimental theatre company that Julien Beck and Judith Malina established in 1947. She also composed music for three films: Marie Menken's Visual Variations on Noguchi (1953 version), Jonas Menken's Guns of the Trees (1962), and Maryette Charlton's Zen in Ryoko-in (1971). In 1971, she composed two works for brass quintet that were later used for Hawkins’s dances Angels of the Inmost Heaven and Of Love. The prestigious American Brass Quintet performed at the latter work’s premiere. Two years later, composer and conductor Pierre Boulez commissioned the trumpet concerto Abyss and Caress, which the New York Philharmonic premiered in 1975. Dlugoszewski received many prestigious awards for her concert works during the 1970s, a period when she took a leave from the Hawkins Dance Company to pursue her interests in instrumental composing. In 1971, her Tender Theatre Flight Nagiere was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and two years later she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1978, she became the first woman to receive the Koussevitzky International Recording Award for Fire Fragile Flight (1973).
Dlugoszewski composed few works during the 1980s and 1990s as she dealt with the health of her parents and her spouse, and many of the compositions from this period remain unfinished. Two years after Erick Hawkins died, she succeeded him as the artistic director for the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, and she began choreographing her own dances. In 1999, her choreographed work Radical Ardent premiered at the 92nd Street Y Harkness Project. She also premiered three of Erick Hawkins's unfinished works: Journey of a Poet (for Mikhail Baryshnikov) and Last Love Duet in 1997, and Why does a Man Dance in 1999. Dlugoszewski was found dead in her home on April 11, 2000, after she failed to appear during final preparations for the premiere of her choreographed work Motherwell Amor.