Higgins, Dick (actually, Richard Carter)

Higgins, Dick (actually, Richard Carter), English-born American composer, performer, music publisher, and writer; b. Cambridge, March 15, 1938; d. Quebec City, Canada, Oct. 26, 1998. He was taken to the U.S. as a child. He studied piano in Worcester, Mass. After training in composition and orchestration with Harry Levenson (1953), he studied with Cowell at Columbia Univ., where he took a B.S. in English (1960), and with Cage at the New School for Social Research (1958–59). Caught up in the avant-garde movement, he became a proponent of the intermedia group who advocated the union of music with other allied arts. In 1958 he became active in the first “happenings,” and from 1961 he worked in the Fluxus movement. He was founder-director of the Something Else Press (1964–73). In 1972 he founded Unpublished Editions, which became Printed Editions in 1978. He taught at the Calif. Inst. of the Arts (1970–71) and was a research assoc. in the visual arts dept. of the State Univ. of N.Y. at Purchase (from 1983). He wrote widely on music and the arts. In his compositions, he pursued the objective of total involvement, in which music is verbalized in conceptual designs without reification or expressed in physical action. He also utilized graphic notation. Among his works are Graphis, a series of pieces for Varying Groups (from 1958), Danger Music, a series of pieces for Varying Groups (1961–64), Hrusalk, opera (1965), The 1000 Symphonies, a series for Orch. (from 1968), Piano Album, 1962-84 (1980), 26 Mountains for Viewing the Sunset From for Singers, Dancers, and Chamber Orch. (1980), Trinity for Piano and Percussion (1981), Variations on a Natural Theme for Orch. (1981), and Si. Columbia for String Quartet, Orch. or 4 Voices, Chorus, and Tubular Chimes (1983), as well as numerous vocal works, tape pieces, many performance works with music, and film scores. Among his many books are Foew & Ombuhnw (N.Y., 1969), Computers for the Arts (Somer-ville, Mass., 1970), A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts (N.Y., 1978; 2^nd ed., rev., 1979), and Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale, III, 1983).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire