Terrible Freedom

The Life and Work of Lucia Dlugoszewski

Amy C. Beal

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780520386655
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520386662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

From her childhood in Detroit to her professional career in New York City, American composer Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925–2000) lived a life of relentless creativity as a poet and writer, composer for dance, theater, and film, and, eventually, choreographer. Forging her own path after briefly studying with John Cage and Edgard Varèse, Dlugoszewski tackled the musical issues of her time. She expanded sonic resources, invented instruments, brought new focus to timbre and texture, collaborated with artists across disciplines, and incorporated spiritual, psychological, and philosophical influences into her work. Remembered today almost solely as the musical director for the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, Dlugoszewski's compositional output, writings on aesthetics, creative relationships, and graphic poetry deserve careful examination on their own terms within the history of American experimental music.

ONE

Lucille in Detroit (1925–48)

I think I wanted to be a composer even as a little girl because there are so many things that music can do, almost more than any other art. It can be faster and subtler, more sensual, more elusive. It can be larger and darker than we imagine, more mysterious, more violent. The dimension of its freedom is dizzying. Its sensitivity is unspeakable.¹

FAMILY LIFE AND EARLY CHILDHOOD

Lucille Ruth Dlugoszewski was born in Detroit, Michigan, on 16 June 1925.² During the year of her birth, Calvin Coolidge was inaugurated to his first elected term, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Roaring Twenties” era-defining novella The Great Gatsby was published, Igor Stravinsky conducted the New York Philharmonic during his first United States tour, and Louis Armstrong began fronting his own band. Less than a year after her birth, Detroit installed its first residential telephones.³

Lucille’s father Chester (Czeslaw; nicknamed “Czesio”) Dlugoszewski (1887–1975) arrived in the United States with an eighth-grade education in 1909. Before settling in Detroit he was employed as a sheet metal worker in Cleveland; in Depression-era Detroit Chester worked in the tool and die trade, eventually coming to work for Fisher Body, a branch of General Motors. Lucille’s mother Jennie (nicknamed “Jolas”) Goralewski (1903–1988) immigrated in 1913, having completed the equivalent of high school. Both parents were born and raised in the Polish town of Plock, on the Vistula River, some seventy miles northwest of Warsaw. Chester and Jennie married in Michigan on 1 March 1924; Jennie was naturalized in Detroit on 17 April 1931, and by 1940 Chester had been naturalized as well.

Lucille grew up fluent in Polish, and the Dlugoszewski household, which moved around frequently in Detroit during her young years, was one filled with Polish pride. A set of undated notes about her family background written down much later in Dlugoszewski’s life include some details about family music making and her parents’ courtship:

[Jennie’s sister] Helen played the violin and Jennie played the piano

They played duets together for their parents + Jennie’s husband, Chester fell in love with her when they played these duets

Chester and Jennie used to go dancing every week at the Polish National Home in Detroit on Chene St. before they were married + danced to 3 o’clock in the morning

when they were first married + Lucia was born they lived on MacDougall in Detroit⁴

In 1930, the Dlugoszewskis lived at 14637 Glenwood Avenue, in the northeastern part of the city near the well-to-do suburb of Grosse Pointe. Between approximately 1935 and 1940, they lived in a rented house at 5210 Moran Street, not far from the General Motors Hamtramck Assembly Plant. (The MacDougall Street mentioned [above] in Dlugoszewski’s autobiographical notes also stood in the shadow of the GM Hamtramck Assembly Plant, just a few blocks from Moran Street.) In 1942, the year of Lucille’s graduation from high school, Chester registered for the draft, and listed his address as 5327 Baldwin Avenue, about a mile away from their previous house on Moran Street, and this is the address Lucille used throughout her college years. By August 1948 the family had moved to 9894 Chenlot Avenue. Later in life she claimed to have grown up in Detroit’s “slums.”⁵

In an interview conducted around 1960, Dlugoszewski characterized her childhood in Detroit in unambiguous ways. She described the cultural background of her Polish-born parents, and described Poland—a place she never visited—as “a country vivid for rebellion, courage, exile.” (She also referred to what she called the family’s musical “chauvinism” with regard to their preference for Polish composer Frédéric Chopin.⁶) She described her father as being agnostic but raised culturally Catholic, with interests in mathematics, science, and dialectics. She described her mother as an amateur painter and as a person drawn to nature. Furthermore, she said, her mother displayed “simplicity, sensibility, respect for danger, lack of sentimental romanticism and idealism, [and a] delight in clear, radiant physicality.” This trope remained consistent throughout her life: a feature article in the Detroit News published in 1972 explained that “Lucia credits her father, who was a toolmaker, with filling her head with liberal politics and intellectual pursuits; her mother, a painter and naturalist, nurtured her interest in the arts.”⁷ (In a separate, undated, typewritten “biography” Lucille described her father as an “ardent amateur in mathematics and political science” and her mother as a “painter.”) She identified her hometown as “a factory city, therefore haunted, ugly, surreal, [and] slightly Charles Dickens.” She recalled growing up surrounded by Midwestern dialects, French and Native American place names, and the unique terrain of the Great Lakes region: the “delicate blue uniqueness of [the] Northern sky and fresh water, exquisite bareness of deciduous trees . . . , much smell of snow.”⁸ The Michigan of Dlugoszewski’s youth would remain a powerful source of metaphor and nostalgia throughout her life.

Her ambiguous reference to Dickens notwithstanding, Lucille’s poetic depiction of her hometown neglected to mention the grim and gritty realities of the Detroit in which she grew up. Her “haunted, ugly, surreal” factory city was perhaps made so in part through the corruption of the Prohibition-era bootleg industry, strangled by organized crime’s violent domination over liquor trafficking across the Detroit River between Windsor, Ontario, and Michigan speakeasies and “blind pigs”—illegal drinking locales, perhaps as many as twenty-five thousand of them in Detroit alone during Prohibition. As much as 85 percent of all the liquor smuggled into the United States from Canada is likely to have entered the United States in this way.⁹

The auto industry flourished alongside the organized distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of bootleg Canadian liquor.¹⁰ As a result, Lucille and her family—especially her father, who worked in the auto industry—were eyewitnesses to the unprecedented and also violent union activities in Detroit, Pontiac, and elsewhere in the region, including the first “sit-down” strike at the General Motors Fisher Body Plant No. 1 in Flint on 30 December 1936, during the fight to establish the United Auto Workers. Racial tensions resulting from attempts to desegregate public housing were also on the rise during Lucille’s childhood and teenage years. And as the United States entered the Second World War, Detroit’s auto industry, suddenly known as “The Arsenal of Democracy,” exclusively manufactured war materials like armored tanks, bomber planes, and other vehicles for use in the battles overseas.¹¹ In the immediate postwar era, while Lucille was in college at Detroit’s Wayne State University, the metropolis saw large populations moving away from the inner city and out toward the automobile-friendly suburbs. Lucille’s family, too, eventually moved to a wooded lakeside suburb outside the city.

The Detroit of Lucille’s childhood was also one populated by Polish immigrants and second-generation Polish Americans, some three hundred fifty thousand of them by 1930, many of whom were drawn to the area because of the booming automobile industry. In particular, the Polish neighborhood of Hamtramck increased from just under four thousand in 1910 to a peak population of sixty thousand in 1928, and was by some accounts the most densely populated city in the United States at that time.¹² “Hamtramck was a very comfortable place for Poles,” wrote local historian Dennis Badaczewski: “For immigrants especially it was a place where one could remain Polish—speaking the same language, following the same religion, living by the same customs, as in Poland.”¹³ Most Poles in Detroit during the Depression were Catholic churchgoers, many of whom belonged to the Polish National Catholic Church.¹⁴ This hegemonic culture clashed with a new wave of immigrants from the South in the early 1940s, namely some estimated fifty thousand African Americans and two hundred thousand whites from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, who came to work in Detroit’s factories, bringing with them a new dynamic in racial conflict that caused the city to face “a rapid deterioration of race relations.”¹⁵

In the shadow of these conflicts, Lucille’s family seems to have adhered to certain Polish customs, including the typical Christmas Eve Wigilia (“vigil,” in Polish) dinner, a traditional meal with holiday-specific foods, and festivities that began with the first appearance of the evening star.¹⁶ Dlugoszewski invoked the spirit of Wigilia throughout her life, perhaps because it symbolized her Polish heritage and upbringing. The word itself would become obsessively recycled in Dlugoszewski’s later writings, as did references to the appearance of the evening star. In several of those writings, she also analyzed the divergent influences her parents had on her psychological makeup, blaming her mother, on at least one occasion, for her own competitive nature:

Jolas

seduced me

ravished me through aesthetics

then lived through me

so nothing I did was good enough

and she made me think

that she would stop loving me

if I didn’t get every prize

every award

and my one escape route

where I was true

was my creativity and the open door to that adventure

also

intellectual adventure

which was

always

Czesio

Another writing made a similar comparison of her parents, with a more favorable depiction of her mother:

Czesio courage

courage thru intellect

Face anything

but this way you know

you understand

+ that is worth

the world + a whole life

Jolas courage

the gift of courage

not through intellect

but through love

go sweet adventurer

try the most dangerous challenge

Have that ultimate fun of life

of trying the limit of adventure

don’t fear, you have nothing to lose

because I will always love you

In the late 1980s, for the benefit of a New York Times writer, Dlugoszewski described herself as “the only child and hope of a Polish immigrant family.” “So I had to be a prodigy,” she added.¹⁷

Lucille attended Detroit public schools and completed first grade at the Ferry School in Grosse Pointe Woods the day after her sixth birthday. Her elementary school report cards show that she was repeatedly given excellent marks in the subjects of literature, geography, and music. Lucille also wrote prolifically from an early age, and since her father worked away from home in Flint, Michigan, for an extended period while she was young, she had ample opportunities to practice her letter-writing skills. Her earliest extant letters, written to her father when she was just eight years old, revealed her enthusiasm for school, her love of learning, and her pride in her own academic successes.¹⁸

In other letters from this period she told her father about poems she was writing, and would relay conversations she had with people during the course of her days. She described receiving mail from the White House after she sent a letter to President Roosevelt (an executive branch spokesperson explained that the commander in chief did...

Table of contents

• Imprint
• Subvention
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Margins, Shadows, and Footnotes: An Introduction
• 1  •  Lucille in Detroit (1925–48)
• 2  •  Letters from New York (1949–51)
• 3  •  New York Beginnings: A Broader View (1950–53)
• 4  •  Expanding Creativity and Collaboration (1953–60)
• 5  •  The Disparate Element (1960–70)
• 6  •  Aesthetic Immediacy (1970–80)
• 7  •  Rage (1980–87)
• 8  •  Losses (1988–2000)
• Out from the Shadows: A Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Selected Works List
• Appendix 2: Lucia Dlugoszewski–Erick Hawkins Collaborations
• Appendix 3: Discography
• Notes
• Sources and Bibliography
• Index