Lucia Dlugoszewski; Dance Company Director, Creator of Musical Instruments

Lucia Dlugoszewski, 68, the artistic director of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. Born in Detroit, Dlugoszewski began writing music at the age of 6. After training in science at Wayne State University, she moved to New York in 1949 to study music and piano. Two years later she developed the timbre piano, a conventional piano whose strings are struck with beaters and played with a variety of bows or pieces of wood, ivory and metal. She went on to invent a whole orchestra of new percussion instruments, including tangent rattles and ladder harps, and wrote music for those creations. Hailed by Virgil Thomson for the “great delicacy, originality and beauty of her work,” she was often cited by critics for her fascinating experiments in new forms and tonalities. She also created scores for several Hawkins Dance Company performances. She assumed direction of the company after Hawkins, her husband, died in 1994. On Tuesday at her home in Greenwich Village of natural causes.