American female composer, choreographer and inventor with Polish roots. A pupil of John Cage and Edgar Varèse who, after years of relative anonymity, is now attracting increasing attention from musical avant-garde circles.
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Lucia Dlugoszewski (Długoszewski) was born in 1925 in Detroit to a family of Polish emigrants. From an early age, she was drawn to music, although playing an instrument was only one of the many interests of the future composer. On the one hand, she studied piano and composition at the Detroit Conservatory of Music; on the other, she studied physics and mathematics at Wayne State University. During this time, she also began to explore philosophy and write poetry. As if that wasn’t enough, Dlugoszewski tried to get into medical school. It was only when she found out that her application had been rejected that she decided to tie her future to music. She abandoned the idea of being a doctor, and with it, her hometown of Detroit. In 1948, she moved to New York.
Instead of Bach
Although music was an important – if not the key – reason for Dlugoszewski’s move, the artist was not yet leaning towards the avant-garde at the time. Perhaps she did not think of herself as a future composer at all. She came to New York primarily as a pianist. In fact, she developed her skills as an instrumentalist there under the tutelage of Grete Sultan, who prepared her for a recital in which Dlugoszewski was to perform the first volume of the cycle Das Wohltemperierte Klavier in one of the halls of Carnegie Hall. In an article by Allen Hughes for The New York Times, the artist recalled that it was at this time that she met Eric Hawkins – the famous choreographer, dancer and her future husband. His studio was right next door to Sultan’s flat. Hawkins was looking for a composer with whom he could form an artistic collaboration. Dlugoszewski never gave a Bach recital.
From this point onwards, Dlugoszewski’s career and artistic development began to be largely shaped by strong artistic personalities: Hawkins, and the composer and philosopher John Cage, whom Dlugoszewski probably met through Sultan, his good friend. The latter relationship quickly became complicated, not least because the partner of the author of 4’33 was Merce Cunningham, a prominent choreographer and dancer and therefore a rival of Hawkins. Her husband’s influence on Dlugoszewski’s compositional path, on the other hand, can be attested to by the fact that most of her works were written with dance in mind. Michał Mendyk, in his review of the book Terrible Freedom: the Life and Work of Lucia Dlugoszewski by Amy C. Beal on the pages of Ruch Muzyczny magazine, wrote:
It is conjectured that the illustrious choreographer treated his wife as an emissary of his artistic empire, not always encouraging the development of her autonomous career (of the dozen or so Dlugoszewski opuses composed in the 1960s, almost all were composed for dance).
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Amy C. Beal, 'Terrible Freedom: The Life and Work of Lucia Dlugoszewski', photo: University of California Press
The effects of the marital collaboration could be heard, among others, at the Theatre of Nations Festival in Paris (1963) or at Expo 67 in Montreal. The 1970s, meanwhile, saw the creation of Dlugoszewski’s most recognisable autonomous works: the New York Philharmonic-commissioned Abyss and Caress (1975) and Fire Fragile Flight (1977), which earned her the Koussevitzky International Recording Award. Dlugoszewski was awarded this prestigious prize as the first female composer in history.
A game of gestures & meanings
The author of the quoted review is co-responsible for the release of the album Openings of the (eye) (2020) with compositions by Dlugoszewski. Her works, on the album released by Mendyk’s label Bolt Records, are heard performed by the Warsaw-based Hashtag Ensemble. Recalling that recording, flutist Ania Karpowicz, who took care of the album’s artistic production, draws attention to the character of the works collected here.
The expressive gestures, the often slow pulse, a certain almost antique care in the construction of timing very clearly referred to movement, to the possibilities of the human body, to a dance of a very conceptual and formal nature. The rhythmic nature of the ‘dance’ pieces might suggest a simple metre and repetitive rhythm but nothing could be further from the truth. With Długoszewski, dance is a play of gestures and meanings, which is directly reflected in the music.
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Hashtag Ensemble album 'Lucia Długoszewski: Openings of the eye', photo: DUX
An article by Libby Smigel, curator of dance at the Library of Congress, reveals that, at Hawkins’ instigation, Dlugoszewski did not publish her scores to avoid the costs associated with intermediaries. As a result, however, these records were inaccessible to performers, musicologists or enthusiasts of the 20th-century avant-garde for decades. Karpowicz explains:
As Lucia Dlugoszewski had no publisher during her lifetime, her scores remain to some extent private, working material. We don’t know for whom she wrote the indications contained in the scores, and we don’t know if what we find on paper is the entirety of the work and notation. She left works such as the string quartet complete and described, evidently preparing a notation for musicians, while works written for herself will always remain a mystery to researchers. The pieces included on the ‘Hashtag Ensemble’ album are written so strictly that they left no room for free interpretation or improvisation in terms of pitch or time progression. Because of Luci Dlugoszewski’s sensitivity and writing style, however, they were a wonderful laboratory for sound experimentation. Finding the right colour palette within the individual instruments and ensembles was a great pleasure and adventure.
Empathetic preparation
A composer who had a great influence on Dlugoszewski’s music was certainly Edgar Varèse, with whom she studied composition. Among other things, the French composer inspired her to experiment more boldly with sound. By experimenting with tones and inventing new instruments (especially percussion instruments), Dlugoszewski attempted to draw the listener away from her habits and away from generating obvious emotions attributed to specific sounds. Among her many inventions was the ‘timbre piano’, an idea she developed as a counterpoint to Cage’s idea of the ‘prepared piano’.
Karpowicz explains:
Timbre piano is an ‘emphatic preparation’, which Dlugoszewski achieved using methods familiar to herself, but nowhere did she write down either an aesthetic manifesto or a set of guidelines for the use of the piano. In our work, we tried to get as close as possible to the guidelines contained in the score, searching for sounds through a variety of performance and preparation methods. Dlugoszewski, like many eminent composers, seemed to want to transcend the instrument, which in the case of the piano means moving away from the ‘percussiveness’ and mechanism of the sound, and moving towards such colouristic treatments, the source of which is difficult to trace and which are not associated with the piano.
Regardless of later animosities, the composer was also linked to Cage by her love of poetry (she wrote poetry in Polish throughout her life) and Far Eastern philosophy. Looking for novelty in her work, on the other hand, Michał Mendyk wrote about her attempts to invent new percussion music – less aggressive, more sensual, suggesting a feminist perspective. Anna Karpowicz, meanwhile, draws attention to: ‘interpreting “vertical time”, moments of musical action – condensed, powerful and fascinatingly dispersed in time.
Lucia Dlugoszewski died in 2000 in New York. It was only after her death that the Library of Congress managed to acquire documents left by her and Hawkins. Access to the composer’s scores triggered a period of heightened interest in her oeuvre. This is evidenced not only by the album and her biography mentioned here, but also by the presentation of Dlugoszewski’s work by Ensemble Musikfabrik at this year’s MaerzMusik festival in Berlin and an album dedicated to her being prepared by Klangforum Wien.
