As a member of the New York School centered around John Cage, with whom she had a fluctuating relationship between friendship and open disagreement, Lucia Dlugoszewski created distinctive works through which she brought specific qualities of her identity into the experimental tendencies of Western modernistic music. She was the recipient of prestigious awards and in 1977 became the first woman to receive the Koussevitzky International Recording Award. Today, almost 25 years after her death, the composer, poet, inventor of musical instruments, choreographer and stage director is the focus of renewed interest. Dlugoszewski’s compositions are increasingly featured on the programmes of numerous festivals, ensembles and orchestras.
As an inventor of musical instruments and through her collaboration with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, she expanded the realm of musical possibilities. She developed a subtle percussion language based on sensual contact with the instrument as an antithesis to the expansive "patriarchal drumming". Through delicate preparation of a piano’s sound box she developed a "timbre piano" with a rich palette of sounds, as in the opus magnum Fire Fragile Flight (1973). In contrast to fetishizing abstract temporal structures, Dlugoszewski emphasized subjective intuition. Thus, her work also forces us to re-examine a canonized image of the New York School in favour of a more complex history in terms of ethnicity, culture, and gender identity.
