Lucia Długoszewski: Abyss and Caress

“But if you ask me, this one belongs to Detroit. For all her elsewhere similarities – and there are many: frequent comparison is made to Partch, with her arsenal of custom-built percussion; Monk, for their shared work on dance; Cage, for her extreme experiments in prepared piano; and her teacher Varèse, for her delimited structuralism – Lucia Dlugoszewski’s first 25 years in Hamtramck, the Polish enclave, reveal more of her practice than any aesthetic resemblance ever could. It is in my city’s habit to bear forth these fringe cosmologists, strange insurgents who wield erudition with a confounding and idiosyncratic sensuality. Dlugoszewski shares – with Alice Coltrane, Robert Ashley, Grace Lee Boggs and adrienne maree brown – this Motor City sensibility, bound not by their thinking about Detroit so much as how the city thinks through them.”