Dika Newlin

Dika NewlinDika Newlin (November 22, 1923 – July 22, 2006) was a composer, pianist, professor, musicologist, and punk rock singer. She received a Ph.D. from Columbia University at the age of 22. She was one of the last living students of Arnold Schoenberg and was a Schoenberg scholar and a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond from 1978 to 2004. She performed as an Elvis impersonator and played punk rock while in her seventies in Richmond, Virginia.

She was featured in the documentary Dika: Murder City.

Early life Dika Newlin was born in Portland, Oregon. Her name was chosen by her mother and refers to an Amazon in one of Sappho's poems. Her parents were academics and her family moved to East Lansing, Michigan, so that her father could teach English at Michigan State University. Neither of her parents were musicians, but her grandmother was a piano teacher and her uncle a composer. A child prodigy, Newlin was able to read the dictionary by age 3 and started piano lessons at age 6 with Arthur Farwell. He encouraged her early interest in composing, and when she was 8 she wrote a symphonic piece, Cradle Song, that was added to the repertoire of Cincinnati orchestra conductor Vladimir Bakaleinikoff and performed three years later by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. A few years later, in 1941, the work was performed in New York with another prodigy, 11-year-old Lorin Maazel, at the NBC Summer Symphony podium and at Interlochen Arts Camp. Bakaleinikoff was impressed by her composition ability and encouraged her to study with Arnold Schoenberg, reportedly telling her parents that "she must go to Schoenberg now. It's exactly the right time....Do it for the sake of American music!"

Newlin kept a diary of her studies with Schoenberg, whom she called "Uncle Arnold." She published the diary in 1980 as Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (1938–1976). One entry in the diary relates how Schoenberg criticized her string quartet writing as "too pianistic." After she acknowledged that she knew it wasn't the best, Schoenberg replied: "No, it is not the best, nor even the second best—perhaps the 50th best, yes?" Her thesis advisor and the university's department head at the time was Paul Henry Lang – as Newlin reports

Academic and musical career After receiving her doctorate, Newlin taught at Western Maryland College from 1945-1949 and then at Syracuse University from 1949-1951. She returned to work with Schoenberg in the summers of 1949 and 1950. In late 1949 her English translation of Schoenberg and his School (by René Leibowitz, another Schoenberg student) was published, and around this time she decided to write his biography and received a Fulbright grant to research his early years in Vienna. She spent a year in Austria, and also performed in Paris, lectured on American music, and made recordings with violist Michael Mann. She also performed the piano part of her Piano Trio, op. 2 in Salzburg at the 1952 Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music.

Newlin's compositions include three operas, a piano concerto, a chamber symphony, and numerous chamber, vocal and mixed-media works. Her mixed-media compositions are largely lost because no one recorded them on video; sound recordings exist in the University of North Texas Music Library.

Newlin also translated many of Schoenberg's works from German to English. Newlin herself sang in a costumed performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which she had translated into English, in Lubbock, Texas in 1999.

Punk rocker Starting in the mid-1980s, Newlin unveiled a new persona in the form of a leather-clad punk rocker with bright orange hair. In this guise, she appeared in horror movies by Richmond producer Michael D. Moore. In director Tim Ritter's 1995 film Creep, she played a person wearing a leather motorcycle jacket who puts poison in baby food at a supermarket. With Apocowlypso Newlin performed lead and backing vocals as well as percussion (washboard, tambourine, temple bells) in their peculiar live shows and on the cassette-only EP "Meat the Apocowlypso," the "Electronic Preacher/Richmond Flood" single, and the bootleg "Let It Was" recording. After going through over 20 bass players in their short time together, the members of Apocowlypso went their separate ways in 1988 to pursue other projects.

Newlin was in the GWAR movie Skulhedface in 1994.

Miscellaneous In 1939 the New York Herald Tribune wrote that Dika Newlin had the highest I.Q. score of any Michigan State University student at that time.

Newlin posed for a pinup calendar when she was in her seventies. Der du von dem Himmel bist, 1968 Ageless Icon: The Greatest Hits of Dika Newlin, 2004 Alien Baby Love Songs for People Who Hate Each Other Murder Kitty

Operas

Smile Right to the Bone, 1941 Feathertop, 1942 The Scarlet Letter, 1945

Symphonic works

Cradle Song

Publications 'A Final Musical Testament', The New Leader, 14 Sept 1964, pp. 20–21 (On Deryck Cooke's Performing Version of Mahler's 10th Symphony) Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (1938–1976). New York: Pendragon Press (1980). . Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg. Written as a dissertation in 1945 and published in 1947. "Bruckner's Three Great Masses," Chord and Discord, vol. 2 no. 8, 1958, pp. 21–26. "Four Revolutionaries c.1900-60," Choral Music, 1963, pp. 305–323. "Arnold Schoenberg as Choral Composer," American Choral Review, vol. 6 no. 4, 1964, pp. 7–11. "C.P.E. Bach and Arnold Schoenberg: a Comparison," The Commonwealth of Music, in Honor of Curt Sachs, 1965, pp. 300–306. "The Role of the Chorus in Schoenberg's 'Moses and Aaron'", American Choral Review, vol. 9 no. 1, 1966, pp. 1–4. "The Schoenberg–Nachod Collection: a Preliminary Report," MQ, vol. 54, 1968, pp. 31–46. "Notes from a Schoenberg Biography: From my Los Angeles Diary, 1939," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, vol. 1 no. 3, 1977, pp. 126–136. "The 'Mahler's Brother Syndrome': Necropsychiatry and the Artist," MQ, vol. 66, 1980, pp. 296–304. "Secret Tonality in Schoenberg's Piano Concerto," Perspectives of New Music, vol. 13 no. 1, 1974, pp. 137–139. "Music for the Flickering Image: American Film Scores," Music Educators Journal, vol. 64 no. 1, 1977, pp. 24–35. "The Later Works of Ernest Bloch," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 33 no. 4, 1947, pp. 443–459. "Why Is Schoenberg's Biography So Difficult to Write?" Perspectives of New Music, vol. 12 no. 1/2, 1973, pp. 40–42. "Some Tonal Aspects of Twelve-Tone Music," American Music Teacher, vol. 3 no. 2, 1953, pp. 2–3, 18.