Disparate Stairway Radical Other (excerpt, 1995)
Lucia Dlugoszewski
American composer Lucia Dlugoszewski (1931-2000) cultivated a distinctive voice amidst the chaotic chorus of avant-garde music in the second half of the 20th century. She studied with Edgard Varèse in the early 1950s, and her music shows his influence, as well as that of New York School composers such as John Cage, who became advocates of her work. Dlugoszewski favored the use of unconventional instruments, such as the “timbre piano” (a systematic expansion of that instrument’s acoustic potential by means of Cagean “preparations” as well as unorthodox methods of exciting the strings) and a series of custom-built devices–some 100 in number–constructed according to her designs. Like many in her milieu she was powerfully affected by Eastern philosophy and its calls to reclaim the immediacy of experience. Through extremely subtle nuances of timbre, provocative silences, and brusque juxtapositions of sonic material, Dlugoszewski sought to circumvent perceptual habits and confront the listener with the immediacy of sound. She writes, “The first concern of all music in one way or another is to shatter the indifference of hearing, the callousness of sensibility, to create that moment of solution we call poetry, our rigidity dissolved when we occur reborn–in a sense, hearing for the first time.”
Source: Disparate Stairway Radical Other
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June 21, 2013, 1:57pm