Arcana is thrilled to be part of Pure Lucia – Night 2: Duende Otherness, the second night of a two-part program celebrating the work of composer Lucia Dlugoszewski presented by Bowerbird and FringeArts. This program traces Dlugoszewski’s artistic trajectory from her mid-career works, composed after firmly establishing her collaboration with choreographer Erick Hawkins, to the culminating masterworks of her later years. Featuring chamber music, solo works, and choreography, the evening highlights Dlugoszewski’s radical approach to sound, her inventive instrumentation, and her lifelong pursuit of new sonic possibilities. Performers include Either/Or Ensemble, trumpeter Peter Evans, Arcana New Music Ensemble, pianist Agnese Toniutti, the Daedalus Quartet, and the Erick Hawkins Dance Company.
Lucia Dlugoszewski’s name is pronounced LOO-sha dwoo-goh-SHEF-skee.
CONCERT PROGRAM
All music by LUCIA DLUGOSZEWSKI (1925 – 2000)
Lords of Persia (1965)
Either/Or
– Christa Van Alstine, clarinets
– Tiago Linck, trumpet
– Matt Melore, bass trombone
– Lauren Cauley, violin
– Russell Greenberg, percussion
– Chris McIntyre, conductor
Space is a Diamond (1970)
Peter Evans, trumpet
Excerpts from Black Lake (1969)
Arcana New Music Ensemble
– Jonathan Leeds, clarinet
– Molly Germer, violin
– Ju-Ping Song, timbre piano
– Andy Thierauf, percussion
INTERMISSION
Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does a Woman Love a Man?) (1997/2000)
Agnese Toniutti, timbre piano
Disparate Stairway Radical Other (1995)
For string quartet with five dancers; choreography *Elusive Pierce* by Katherine Duke
Daedalus Quartet
– Min-Young Kim, violin
– Matilda Kaul, violin
– Jessica Thompson, viola
– Thomas Kraines, cello
Erick Hawkins Dance Company
– Jason Hortin
– Hayley Meier
– JR Gooseberry
– Halie Landers
– Rylee Lucero
This event is part of PURE LUCIA, a retrospective of the life and work of Lucia Dlugoszewski. View the program for the previous night: Pure Lucia – Night 1: Quidditas Suchness
PROGRAM NOTES
The program opens with Lords of Persia (1965), performed by the New York-based Either/Or Ensemble. Written for a dance by Hawkins, the piece reflects Dlugoszewski’s deep interest in the Japanese concept of Nageire, which she described as a process of “flinging in” musical materials with a sense of reckless asymmetry.
Space is a Diamond (1970), performed by trumpeter Peter Evans, is one of Dlugoszewski’s most celebrated works. Composed for Gerard Schwarz, an early champion of her music, it remains one of the few pieces she published commercially and one of the most widely recognized in her catalog. The work demands extraordinary virtuosity, employing extended trumpet techniques, including extreme registers, rapid mute changes, and sweeping glissandi. Through these innovations, Dlugoszewski transformed the trumpet’s sonic identity, expanding its expressive range in ways that were groundbreaking for the time.
Philadelphia’s Arcana New Music Ensemble presents excerpts from Black Lake (1969), another work composed for a Hawkins dance. Dlugoszewski’s compositional style often reflected a fusion of Eastern and Western philosophical ideas, and Black Lake is no exception. Structured as a series of short movements, the work incorporates forms such as the fugue and chaconne alongside concepts drawn from Eastern aesthetics, including sabin, wabi, and p’o—ideas that emphasize imperfection, transience, and the expressive qualities of restraint. The piece also showcases some of Dlugoszewski’s most distinctive invented percussion instruments, including Ladder Harps, Tangent Rattles, and Square Drums, which lend the music an unmistakably original timbral palette.
Following intermission, pianist Agnese Toniutti performs Exacerbated Subtlety Concert (Why Does a Woman Love a Man?) (1997/2000), one of Dlugoszewski’s final completed works. This composition represents the culmination of nearly five decades of exploration and refinement in her approach to the timbre piano, a radical reimagining of the instrument that she developed through extended techniques and unconventional playing methods.
The evening concludes with Disparate Stairway Radical Other (1995), a work of rhythmic intensity and vivid textures for string quartet and five dancers, performed by the Daedalus Quartet and the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. Originally composed for Hawkins’s dance *Journey of a Poet*, this performance features new choreography by Katherine Duke, current artistic director of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company and a direct artistic descendant of both Hawkins and Dlugoszewski. A defining work in Dlugoszewski’s late career, the music brims with energy, constantly shifting between bold instrumental colors and striking timbral contrasts.
Duende, a concept famously explored by Federico García Lorca, speaks to an almost mystical force in artistic expression—an intensity that arises from deep emotional, physical, and even existential struggle. It is not simply passion or virtuosity but something raw, primal, and unpredictable, emerging from the tension between beauty and darkness, control and surrender. Otherness, in contrast, suggests a state of being outside the familiar, an estrangement from conventional frameworks that allows for new modes of perception and experience.
The program title Duende Otherness reflects Lucia Dlugoszewski’s pursuit of music that resists the expected and embraces the unknown. Duende evokes the visceral, almost physical energy of sound as a living force, while Otherness signals her commitment to breaking away from inherited traditions, whether through new instrumental techniques, unconventional structures, or her rejection of narrative in favor of pure sensory immediacy. In her work, sound does not represent or signify—it becomes, vibrating at the edge of the unfamiliar, inviting the listener into an experience beyond certainty.
