Dlugoszewski, Lucia (1925—)

American composer, pianist, teacher, writer, and inventor of percussion instruments. Pronunciation: DLOO-go-SHEV-skee. Born on June 16, 1925, in Detroit, Michigan; attended the Detroit Conservatory of Music, Wayne State University, and the Mannes School of Music.

Won the National Institute of Arts and Letters award (1966); composed and taught for the Foundation of Modern Dance.

Lucia Dlugoszewski invented over 100 percussion instruments made of plastic, metal, glass, and wood. The best known was the timbre piano which has bows and plectra in addition to a keyboard. Her musical nature found expression as early as age three when she began writing poems and songs as well as playing music. By six, she was studying under Agelageth Morrison at the Detroit Conservatory of Music, where she gave a recital playing her own music. When Dlugoszewski went to college at Wayne State University, she decided to study medicine, but in 1949 she switched to the arts and went to New York to study piano under Grete Sultan . She attended the Mannes School of Music from 1950 until 1951. Felix Salzer and Edgar Varese were her private tutors.

Active in many fields, Dlugoszewski won the Tompkins literary award for poetry in 1947. She was also the first woman to win the Koussevitzky Prize. In the 1960s, she began teaching at New York University and the New School for Social Research. She also began composing for the Foundation for Modern Dance. Many of her compositions were written for the instruments she invented such as Naked Swift Music which used the timbre piano, Concert of Many Rooms and Moving Space which used four unsheltered rattles, and Orchestral Radiant Ground.

John Haag , Athens, Georgia