Lucia Dlugoszewski

Lucia Dlugoszewski, Composer and Choreographer, Dies at 68

Lucia Dlugoszewski, a composer and the artistic director of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, was found dead on April 11, 2000 in her Greenwich Village apartment. She was 68 and died of natural causes.

Born in 1931 in Detroit, Dlugoszewski studied physics and mathematics at Wayne State University and planned to go into medicine before she took up a professional career in music. She studied piano with Grete Sultan, analysis with Felix Salzer, and composition with Edgar Varèse in the early fifties. During that time she was also active writing poetry and collaborating with the philosopher F.S.C. Northrop on aesthetical writings.

Dlugoszewski's music was much admired and supported in the fifties and sixties by New York painters and poets like Robert Motherwell, John Ashbery and Ad Reinhardt, but she was generally avoided by the musical establishment. Virgil Thomson, however, described her music as "far-out music of great delicacy, originality, and beauty of sound."

Around 1951, Ms. Dlugoszewski developed the timbre piano, a conventional piano whose strings are struck with beaters and played with a variety of bows and plectra, or pieces of wood, metal and ivory. She later created percussion and friction instruments, constructed by the sculptor Ralph Dorazio, for musicians performing for Hawkins.

In the seventies, recognition began to come to her music when Pierre Boulez commissioned Abyss and Caress for the New York Philharmonic. Other groups that have performed her music include the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Louisville Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony and the American Composers Orchestra. Composers Recordings, Inc. will release an all-Dlugoszewski CD in the fall of 2000.

Dlugoszewski was the first woman to win the Koussevitzky International Recording Award, in 1977, and has also been honored by the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Dlugoszewski created scores for many signature works by Hawkins, to whom she was married. She became director of his modern-dance company in 1996, two years after his death.

In 1999 she made her formal debut as a choreographer in a program presented by the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Project, which is sponsoring a program of her choreography performed by the Hawkins company at the 91st Street Playhouse in New York City. ''The company will live on, and Erick and Lucy will live on with us,'' Louis Kavouras, a dancer, rehearsal director and company archivist, said recently.

No immediate family members survive.