INTERMISSION

Lords of Persia premiered in July 1965 at the American Dance Festival in New London, Connecticut. The choreography by Erick Hawkins featured four male dancers wielding staffs in a stylized evocation of polo—a sport with historical roots in ancient Persia. Lucia Dlugoszewski’s music is scored for clarinet, trumpet, bass trombone, violin, and one percussionist who plays an array of instruments—both traditional and invented. The invented percussion includes Dlugoszewski’s own creations such as “tangent rattles,” “square drums,” and what she called “waters,” a percussive use of cardboard to evoke fragile or fluid sonic textures. The score is one of her most fully notated surviving works: carefully copied, professionally bound, and unusually complete—though interpretive questions remain, particularly in the percussion part. The music itself is dense and taut, packed with glissandi, ensemble trills, and passages of striking rhythmic unity that are abruptly punctuated by silence or sudden directional shifts.

Balance Naked Flung, Dlugoszewski’s alternate (or musical) title for the piece, serves as what she called a “tiny poem,” a phrase that encapsulates the work’s structural and aesthetic logic. “Balance” signals a tension between extremes—loud and soft, rapid and still. “Naked” speaks to a vulnerability in the act of listening. And “Flung” refers to “nageire,” a Japanese term associated with a style of ikebana (the art of flower arrangement) that emphasizes spontaneity and natural placement—flowers are thrown in without the use of a structured base or formal plan, evoking immediacy, asymmetry, and intuitive gesture. As an aesthetic concept, it became central to her approach, opening a path away from traditional exposition and toward sudden leaps in thought and sound, what she once described as an “architecture of speed.”

In later writings, Dlugoszewski described the piece as “springtime music… a constant nageire,” situating it within a lineage of works that favored sensation over sentiment. She echoed the language of an earlier solo composition titled The space of March and April and May has turned the world on its tender side and we have to turn the same way, drawing a poetic continuity between the two. Though composed midstream in her long creative partnership with Hawkins, Lords of Persia quickly found its own footing in concert settings—performed without dance and regarded as one of her key achievements from the 1960s. The piece has since been programmed by numerous contemporary music ensembles and remains one of the most accessible entry points into her instrumental work.

In addition to the widely performed quintet version of Lords of Persia, Dlugoszewski composed another version—presumed to be earlier—also titled Lords of Persia, for the quartet instrumentation of two trumpets, clarinet, and percussion. Despite the shared title, the two pieces are musically unrelated. The earlier version is a fully developed composition, but whether it was ever performed is currently unknown. It survives in manuscript form only and offers further insight into Dlugoszewski’s experimentation with unusual instrumentations and ensemble interplay during the early 1960s.

Dlugoszewski’s Space is a Diamond (1970) remains one of the most blistering and exacting entries in the solo trumpet repertoire. Composed for the virtuoso Gerard Schwarz, the piece emerged at a turning point in Dlugoszewski’s career, as she began to assert a compositional voice increasingly distinct from her long partnership with choreographer Erick Hawkins. If earlier works explored the delicate interplay between music and movement, Space is a Diamond thrusts the trumpet onto a tightrope stretched between fragility and ferocity—”a fragile hanging bridge,” as Dlugoszewski wrote, “spanning the silence of the ear.”

Clocking in at roughly ten minutes, the piece unfolds in a continuous arc of six unnamed sections that leave no room for rest or breath. The music was built around the Japanese aesthetic notion of nageire—”flung into”—and conjures the sensation of flight into perilous heights. The trumpet line spirals across more than four octaves, leaping with breakneck speed between registers and dynamics. Its technical arsenal includes half-valve glissandi, “ricochet” slurs, whisper trills, “percussive bubbles” (created by striking the mouthpiece with the palm), and the particularly demanding “flap tongue”—a sound produced by pushing air with the tongue upward against the teeth, rather than using conventional tonguing.

Central to the composition is a complex choreography of mute changes—seven distinct types are required, including straight, cup, solo tone, whisper, plunger, and both stem-in and stem-out versions of the harmon mute. Dlugoszewski devised a custom notation system to mark each mute, with green symbols for insertion and red for removal. The player must switch mutes in rapid succession, using one hand to maneuver the hardware mid-phrase, all while navigating an intricate web of color-coded and graphically indicated performance gestures. Timbre, for Dlugoszewski, is not an effect but a structural force, carrying the music’s momentum as much as pitch or rhythm.

Space is a Diamond became Dlugoszewski’s first professionally recorded work when Schwarz included it on his 1972 album The New Trumpet (Nonesuch). Lauded by critics and fellow composers alike—William Bolcom noted that it “enters a new sound world”—the piece remains one of her most circulated and celebrated compositions. Despite its modest scale, it epitomizes her radical instrumental imagination and stands as a high-water mark of 20th-century writing for brass.

Black Lake premiered on October 20, 1969, in New York City, as a collaboration between Dlugoszewski and Hawkins. The dance featured seven masked performers and was divided into nine parts, described in Dlugoszewski’s program notes as “metaphors of eight different evocations of the sky at night conveyed through movement, music and costuming.” The musical score, titled The Suchness of Nine Concerts, was scored for clarinet, violin, timbre piano, and extensive percussion.

The music, composed after the choreography, was structured independently and in silence, as Dlugoszewski noted, “as a fresh structure independent of the dance.” Yet it was crafted to reflect each movement “as an opera composer would be aware of each word in a sensitive libretto.” Rather than imitation, the music engages in a wide-ranging counterpoint, often diverging from the dance’s rhythms and shapes. One passage from her notes describes a moment in the “Sun Setting” section where “a searingly wild leap catapults from the base of powerful sound into an eerie disturbing silence that gives sudden new meaning to the movement.”

The score called for considerable use of Dlugoszewski’s invented instruments and techniques. A single violin harmonic might follow a cymbal crash, emerging “magically” out of silence, while timbre piano and percussion operate in discrete sonic layers. She described her approach as engaging “all degrees of consonance and dissonance with the dance movements and often commenting poetically in sound on some individual movements in strange, almost contradictory ways.”

Dlugoszewski provided each musical section with a title derived from Chinese and Japanese aesthetic thought, including terms like p’o (unshaped matter), sabi (emptiness), wabi (talentless rejoicing), and karumi (lightness). “Literal imitation is put aside in favor of poetic essence,” she wrote. “The actuality of the dancer’s person is masked and is at the service of the poetic metaphor.” In another note, she emphasized the role of juxtaposition: “This sound with this movement—the creative dangers of a new philosophy of juxtaposition when Dlugoszewski writes music for Hawkins dance.”

Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does a Man Love a Woman?) is one of Dlugoszewski’s final works for her timbre piano, composed in 1997, premiered in January 1998, and revised in 2000 for a studio recording session on January 17, produced by Jonathan Schultz. A solo tour de force of preparation and touch, the piece explores what Dlugoszewski called the “elegance of the ungraspable”—a realm where music’s elusive, fleeting nature becomes its most potent expressive force. Reviewers and collaborators noted the exhaustive care she took in preparing the instrument, applying materials such as paper, hairpins, thimbles, baby food jars, rubber wedges, tuning forks, combs, and flexatones to transform the piano into an entirely new percussive world.

In the liner notes for the 2000 recording, Hal Rammel recalls Dlugoszewski describing the opening gestures as “like gentle kisses of foreplay,” emphasizing the work’s mix of delicacy and volatility. Joel Thome, who witnessed the session, remarked that it would be easier to list what wasn’t used on the piano than what was. What emerges is a piece of sharply articulated gestures and subtle transitions, filled with unexpected percussive detonations, shimmering resonance, and finely shaded textures.

The work also featured in Dlugoszewski’s 1999 dance Radical Ardent. Reviewing the performance for the Village Voice, Deborah Jowitt wrote: “The core of Radical Ardent, a series of male-female duets, is sound as a nut, and the music caresses them, deliciously undercutting sweetness with a slightly raucous or abrasive touch.” In the small theater setting, audiences watched “a musician shaking a sheet of paper or tinkling little glass chimes.” Jowitt concluded: “A composer makes a successful beginning as a choreographer. Amazing.”

Disparate Stairway Radical Other is a string quartet composed by Lucia Dlugoszewski for Journey of a Poet, the final choreographic work by Erick Hawkins. Although Hawkins passed away in 1994, the choreography was largely complete, and members of his company—including Dlugoszewski and Katherine Duke—worked together to finalize and stage the piece. The work premiered in 1997 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, performed by the White Oak Dance Project with Mikhail Baryshnikov in the lead role. The score is dedicated to Baryshnikov, Hawkins (in memoriam), and Mary Norton Dorazio (in memoriam).

The music is divided into more than two dozen short, precisely defined sections. Dlugoszewski labeled these “Phrases” and “Disparate,” using them to structure abrupt transitions, dense collisions, and fleeting moments of stillness. This segmented form reflects her concept of the “disparate element”—a compositional strategy rooted in interruption and immediacy. She described the title’s inspiration in visual terms: a stairway in a Japanese building, placed off to the side with no clear function. “It was just there,” she explained. “And I always call it the disparate stairway.”

In her composer’s notes, Dlugoszewski wrote in direct response to the cultural climate of the 1990s, which she saw as increasingly dominated by technological surrogates and a loss of authentic experience. She described live musicianship as a necessary act of resistance: a way to confront “claustrophobic technological take-overs” and to restore the possibility of truly feeling alive. She challenged the performers to push their technique to the limits of speed and articulation—not for virtuosity’s sake, but to reassert music as an immediate, physical, and time-bound act. “What all meditations strive for,” she wrote, “what all spiritual doctrines preach is this ritualized immediacy of being alive, which music, if performed live, can fulfill better than anything else in the world.”

The score demands a wide range of extended techniques. Performers use metal thimbles to tap and strum the strings and tailpiece, bow across Swiss combs, and apply glass slides to generate glissandi and koto-like textures. Other instructions call for nail pizzicati, ricochet bowing, glissando trills, and sliding bariolage. One recurring gesture, referred to as a “sea gull glissando,” features narrow, rising slides that dissolve into silence.

Tonight’s performance features Elusive Pierce, a choreography by Katherine Duke, Artistic Director of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. Duke had worked closely with Dlugoszewski on Journey of a Poet, helping shape movement and counts that would guide the music. She premiered Elusive Pierce in 2005, and revisited the work in 2014, reworking both the choreography and musical pairing. Eventually, she found in Disparate Stairway Radical Other a powerful and instinctive connection. “Primitive instinct arises from the separation of cell from cell, of an animal from its young,” she writes. “Its temporariness recurs, leading to self-reliance and self-realization. Lucia would say: What is most beautiful is what is distantly connected.”

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925–2000) was an American composer, poet, and performer whose work challenged the conventions of postwar music. Born in Detroit to Polish immigrant parents, she moved to New York in 1949, where she studied with Edgard Varèse and became immersed in the city’s experimental arts scene. She developed a radical performance practice called the “timbre piano,” which used mallets and objects to activate the strings and frame of the instrument, and she built an ensemble of invented percussion instruments in collaboration with sculptor Ralph Dorazio. For nearly fifty years, she was composer-in-residence for the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, creating over twenty scores in close dialogue with choreography. Her concert works—commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Library of Congress, and others—expanded the expressive possibilities of acoustic instruments and often centered timbre and gesture over melody or harmony. Long overlooked, her legacy is now being rediscovered as a vital voice in 20th-century experimental music.

Erick Hawkins (1909–1994) was born in Trinidad, Colorado. He graduated in 1932 from Harvard University. German dancer Harald Kreutzberg so impressed him that he went to study with him in Austria. Then he studied with George Balanchine at the School of American Ballet. In 1937 he choreographed Show Piece which was performed by Ballet Caravan. Hawkins was the first man to dance with Martha Graham performing the male lead in a number of her works, including Appalachian Spring in 1944. Not long afterwards, he met and began collaborating with the experimental composer Lucia Dlugoszewski. Together they moved towards an aesthetic vision detached from realistic psychology, plot, social or political agenda and redefining dance technique according to newly understood principles of kinesiology, creating a bridge to later somatic studies. On October 14, 1994, one month before he died, he was presented with the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton.

Either/Or (EO) is a flexible chamber ensemble based in New York City advancing a repertoire drawn from a wide spectrum of experimental traditions. Winner of the 2015 CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, EO presents inclusive concert experiences such as surveys of composers like Tālib-Rāsúl Hākím, Ana-Maria Avram, Chiyoko Szlavnics, and Anthony Braxton; explorations of graphic score approaches by artists like Mendi+Keith Obadike, Joanna Ward, and Raven Chacon; and carefully curated sets or works with titles such as Perspectives and Disclosures and Time | Again. EO’s Directors Richard Carrick and Chris McIntyre draw on a broad collective of 10 regular soloists (and guests) to realize the specific requirements of each project. Since forming in 2004, the group has premiered more than 300 works (as well as dozens of student compositions), toured throughout the US and Sweden, and recorded for labels such as New Focus, New World Records, Starkland, and Sterling Classics.

Peter Evans (b. 1981) is a visionary trumpeter, composer, and bandleader. Known for his fearless blend of genres and sounds, he leads several different projects, most notably the quartet Being & Becoming (with Joel Ross, Nick Joz and Tyshawn Sorey). Working in formats ranging from solo trumpet to large ensembles, Evans’ engagement with the creative process moves beyond traditional distinctions of style. A prolific recording artist, he has released 20 recordings under his name, mostly through his own label More is More Records. Evans has worked with a wide range of artists such as John Zorn, Ellliott Carter, Evan Parker, Craig Taborn and many more. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition and the recipient of other major commissions from institutions such as the Donaueschingen Musiktage and Venice Biennale, Evans tours internationally and has been based in New York City since 2003.

Arcana New Music Ensemble is a Philadelphia-based chamber group dedicated to performing contemporary classical music. Founded in 2016 by musicians, academics, and curators, Arcana champions living composers, revives overlooked masterpieces, and sheds light on lesser-known historical works through concerts, workshops, and residencies. Originally a project of Bowerbird, Arcana has operated independently as a 501(c)(3) since 2019. Drawing from a flexible roster of over fifty musicians, the ensemble adapts its instrumentation to suit each program. In recent seasons, Arcana has collaborated with Pig Iron Theatre Company, Prometheus, and Variant 6, and presented nearly 30 programs featuring works by composers such as Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, Julius Eastman, Claude Vivier, and Raven Chacon.

Agnese Toniutti is an Italian pianist specialized in contemporary and 20th Century music. She dedicates herself to the exploration and research on peculiar piano repertoire, often revolving around the concept of sound and its role in musical composition. Her work investigates the complementarity of composition and improvisation in musical creativity, both as an author and interpreter. Cage, Scelsi, Cardini are some of her favorites; incursions into the territory of improvisation, performance and extemporary composition, are also encouraged by studying Seventies’ art movements. Her collaborations often include other artistic disciplines (acting, photography, dance, visual arts, and multimedia). Among her recent projects is the release of Subtle Matters (Neuma Records, 2021), a recording where she re-interprets the “timbre-piano” invented by Lucia Dlugoszewski, and the verbal scores by Philip Corner, and the recording of Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano by John Cage (Neuma Records 2023), both Best Bandcamp Contemporary Classical of the month. As a soloist and chamber music pianist she has performed in several venues and international festivals in Europe and the USA.

Daedalus Quartet is praised by The New Yorker as “a fresh and vital young participant in what is a golden age of American string quartets.” The group has established itself as a leader among the new generation of string ensembles. Since winning the top prize in the Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2001, the quartet has performed in many of the world’s leading musical venues and won plaudits for its adventurous exploration of contemporary music. To date the Daedalus Quartet has forged associations with some of America’s leading classical music and educational institutions: Carnegie Hall, through its European Concert Hall Organization (ECHO) Rising Stars program; Lincoln Center, which appointed them as the Chamber Music Society Two (now the Bowers Program) quartet and awarded them with the Martin E. Segal Award; and the University of Pennsylvania, where they have served as Quartet-in-Residence since 2006. At Penn, the Daedalus Quartet has been widely praised for their innovative programming and interdisciplinary collaborations, especially in their Beethoven Quartet cycle, Music and Migration, and Bartok’s Monster projects.

Erick Hawkins Dance Company, founded in 1951, has been touring the world since the 1960’s. With unwavering integrity and uncompromising working methods, Hawkins choreography is based on a collaboration of music, art, and dance. The dances are performed to live music, often composed especially for each dance, along with commissioned sets by artists and sculptors. Known for a fluid, effortless style of movement, each dance is energetic yet poetic, serene yet harmonious. These works with significant musicians and artists have made considerable cultural contributions. Dedicated to preserving the legacies of choreographer Erick Hawkins and his partner, composer Lucia Dlugoszewski, the company continues to develop dances based on Hawkins’ pioneering movement theory. Reconstructing and reimagining their work is critical to keeping the form and aesthetic of mid-century modern dance alive. A valuable piece of dance history would be lost to future generations without Hawkins’ and Dlugoszewski’s unique vision.

Katherine Duke began her study with Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski in 1983. She made her professional debut in 1986 with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company at Lincoln Center. Jamake Highwater wrote “…Katherine Duke represents the idealization of Hawkins’s four decades of creating dance.” Duke became Artistic Director of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company in 2001. To preserve and perpetuate the musical, compositional, and choreographic legacies of both Dlugoszewski and Hawkins, Duke has facilitated the reconstruction of classic repertory and new works for many universities and professional companies. Her passion is to share, in its purest form, the beauty of the technique, the unique approach to choreography, and the principles of this legacy through intensives, workshops, and commissions. She continues to bring the Erick Hawkins Dance Company into the present with archival research enriching the Company’s repertory through unexplored works by Hawkins and Dlugoszewski, commissioned choreographers, and her own work.

JR Gooseberry is a distinguished dancer, choreographer, and educator. Embarking on 13 international tours in over twenty countries with advocates of music education, The Young Americans, J.R. experienced national television exposure early on and has now become its Associate Director and Choreographer. Under Bill and Robyn Brawley, J.R. performed alongside Broadway stars Brian Stokes Mitchell, Kelli O’Hara, Susan Egan, and Hugh Panero. He has danced with CalliOpus Contemporary Dance, the Contempo Ballet Company, and currently serves as the choreographer for HEART Global. His dance mentorships include Ms. Brawley, Heidi Jarrett, Alex Little, Jose Costas, Linda Sohl-Ellison, Jason Hortin, Louis Kavouras, Cathy Allen, and Rachel Berman. J.R. received a BFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was introduced to the Hawkins technique and aesthetic and performed Hawkins’ Cantilever for the Martha Graham University Showcase 2023 at the Joyce Theater in New York City.

Jason Hortin studied dance in Olympia, Washington, with Debbi Waits Halfhill. Hortin earned a BFA from University of Nevada, Las Vegas and MFA from the University of Arizona. While at UNLV, Hortin performed Hawkins’ Black Lake and Lucia Dlugoszewski’s Radical Ardent in Las Vegas and New York. Hortin also performed with Moving People Dance Theatre, Robert Moses, and Ronn Stewart. With River North Dance Chicago, Hortin performed works by Frank Chavez, Lynn Taylor-Corbett, Lauri Stallings, Harrison McEldowny, Daniel Ezralow, Randy Duncan, Kevin Iega Jeff, and Julia Rhoads. Hortin danced with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performing over 60 masterworks by Lou Conte, Jiri Kylian, Crystal Pite, William Forsythe, Kyle Abraham, Mats Ek, Sharon Eyal, Ohad Naharin, Nacho Duato, and Twyla Tharp and is now répétiteur for Penny Saunders, Chaves, and Robyn Mineko Williams. Hortin choreographs for HSDC, Bolles High School, Extensions Dance Company, Snowy Range Dance Festival, UNLV, and UA.

Halie Landers is a dynamic performer with extensive training in modern, ballet, jazz, contemporary, aerial silks, and musical theater. Over the past 19 years, Lander’s pursuits in dance and choreography have provided her with incredible opportunities including performing the leading role in Hawkins’ Agathlon, the leading role in Martha Graham’s Heretic, as well as performing at the University of South Korea. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance performance and choreography from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Landers also received UNLV’s  Outstanding Graduating Senior Award.

Rylee Lucero began her dance training in her hometown of Puyallup, Washington. For the last sixteen years Lucero has studied ballet, modern, jazz, contemporary, tap, hip-hop, and musical theater. She graduated from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance performance and choreography, as well as a Pilates certification. UNLV is where she was introduced to the Hawkins technique and aesthetic. In the spring of 2024, Lucero had the opportunity of closely working with Louis Kavouras and Katherine Duke for a performance of Hawkins’ Agathlon. Lucero was the recipient of UNLV’s Outstanding Choreographer Award and the Emilee Barker Award. She is now an instructor of the university’s dance and Pilates programs. Lucero has also performed in the Dance in the Desert Festival, as well as with the Elemental Dance Company in their first ever Pseudo Serenity show about mental health in Las Vegas.

Hayley Meier is a performing artist, choreographer, and educator. Her early training was under Timothy M. Draper. In 2009 she earned a BFA in dance from the University of Arizona on full scholarship where she was honored with the inaugural Hayley Meier Award (now known as the Triple Threat Award). Upon graduation, Meier danced with Rochester City Ballet. She then joined Frank Chaves’ River North Dance Chicago performing works by Adam Barruch, Ashley Rowland, Garrett Moulton, Hanna Brictson, Ivan Perez, Kevin Iega Jeff, Mauro Astolfi, Randy Duncan, Robert Battle, Sherry Zunker, and Sidra Bell. Receiving her MFA from the UA, Meier was awarded the Creative Achievement Award for the School of Dance and Arizona Arts Undergraduate Advising/Mentoring Award as an Assistant Professor of Practice at UA. At South by Southwest in Austin, Texas she contributed to the widely praised StellarScape production blending music, science, visual art, dance, and technology.

Bowerbird
Dustin Hurt, Director
Andy Thierauf, Managing Director

Erick Hawkins Dance Company
Katherine Duke, Artistic Director
Louis Kavouras, Assistant Rehearsal Director
Michael Jarett, lighting design

FringeArts
Mikaela Boone, Programming Director
Kristen Hammer, Director of Production
Devi Bass, Director of Venue and Patron Services
Nick Rahn, Head of Audio
Ayla Taffel, Head Electrician

Major support for PURE LUCIA: THE MUSIC OF LUCIA DLUGOSZEWSKI has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage with additional support from the Amphion Foundation. Presented in collaboration with FringeArts.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage or The Pew Charitable Trusts.