> July 28, 2006
>
> Dika Newlin, 82, Punk-Rock Schoenberg Expert, Dies
>
> By DOUGLAS MARTIN
> Dika Newlin, who composed a symphony at 11, became a distinguished
> composer and musicologist and emerged, in her 70’s and 80’s, as a
> most unlikely punk rocker, died on July 22 in Richmond, Va. She was
> 82.
>
> The cause was complications of a broken arm she suffered on June
> 30, said Sabine Feisst, a professor of musicology at Arizona State
> University who is writing a book on Dr. Newlin.
>
> “It is hard to find out about me because I’m involved in so many
> different things,” Dr. Newlin said in an interview with The
> Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1996. One continuing thread: she was a
> professor at various universities, until her retirement from
> Virginia Commonwealth University two years ago.
>
> Her latest incarnation was as leather-clad, bright-orange-haired
> punk rocker and occasional Elvis impersonator, belting out songs
> like “Love Songs for People Who Hate Each Other,” which she wrote
> herself. Her flamboyant image was not exactly dulled when she posed
> in her 70’s for a pinup calendar.
>
> Dr. Newlin’s earlier prominence grew out of her studies as a
> teenager with the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Dr. Newlin, among the
> last surviving pupils of Schoenberg, wrote the entry on him for the
> Encyclopaedia Britannica.
>
> Dr. Feisst called Dr. Newlin “one of the pioneers of Schoenberg
> research in America.” Dr. Newlin’s doctoral dissertation was
> published as the book “Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg” (1947, 1968).
> She also translated Schoenberg’s works from German to English, and
> her publication of diaries she kept as his student provide some of
> the most intimate glimpses of him.
>
> Dr. Newlin’s own compositions reflect Schoenberg’s innovative
> approach. Those works include three operas, a chamber symphony, a
> piano concerto and numerous chamber, vocal and mixed-media works.
> In 1999, she sang in a costumed performance of Schoenberg’s
> “Pierrot Lunaire,” in her own English translation, in Lubbock, Tex.
>
> In her punk incarnation, Dr. Newlin appeared in horror movies
> produced by Michael D. Moore in Richmond. In “Creep” (1995),
> directed by Tim Ritter, her character, clad in a leather motorcycle
> jacket, poisons baby food on a supermarket shelf.
>
> Dr. Feisst confessed to finding this sort of thing “puzzling and
> disturbing” but said she came to view it as “all part of the package.”
>
> Mr. Moore also directed “Dika: Murder City’’ (1995), a documentary
> about Dr. Newlin.
>
> Dika Newlin, an only child, was born in Portland, Ore., on Nov. 22,
> 1923. Her name, chosen by her mother, refers to an Amazon in one of
> Sappho’s poems.
>
> Her parents, both academics, soon moved to East Lansing, Mich., to
> teach at what is now Michigan State University. Dika could read
> dictionaries at 3, played the piano at 6 and began composing at 7.
>
> She entered grade school at 5 and finished at 8. At 11, she wrote a
> symphonic piece, “Cradle Song.” Three years later, it was performed
> by the Cincinnati Symphony, with Vladimir Bakaleinikoff conducting.
>
> She finished high school at 12 and was accepted as a college
> student by Michigan State, where, The New York Herald Tribune said
> in 1939, she had the highest I.Q. score in the school’s history. At
> the time of the article, she was in New York to hear one of her
> compositions performed at the World’s Fair.
>
> After graduating from Michigan State at 16, she settled with her
> mother in Los Angeles so that she could attend the University of
> California at Los Angeles and study with Schoenberg, who taught
> there. She kept a diary, which she published as a book, “Schoenberg
> Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (1938-76),” in 1980.
>
> Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, Joan Peyser
> marveled at its “absolute ingenuousness,” saying Dr. Newlin seemed
> to have censored nothing.
>
> In one entry, she tells how Schoenberg, an Austrian émigré she
> called Uncle Arnold, criticized her string-quartet style as “too
> pianistic.” She replied that she knew it wasn’t the best writing.
> The entry continues, “He replied, ‘No, it is not the best, nor even
> the second best — perhaps the 50th best, yes?’ ”
>
> She earned her doctorate in musicology from Columbia at 22. She
> studied piano with Artur Schnabel and Rudolf Serkin and made a half-
> dozen piano recordings in the United States and Europe. Many years
> later, in 2004, some of her punk numbers were released on an album
> called “Ageless Icon: The Greatest Hits of Dika Newlin.”
>
> Dr. Newlin, who never married, leaves no immediate family members.
> She has a surviving cousin and was close to her cat, Spot. She once
> kept eight or more cats. Reporters noted that she slept on a
> mattress on the floor with a medieval suit of armor dangling above.
>
> She told The Richmond Times-Dispatch that she had always wanted to
> have a rock band, and hers surely carried her own brand. Who but
> Dr. Newlin could have taken the text Schoenberg used for the fourth
> movement of his second string quartet to use as punk lyrics for
> “Alien Baby”?
>
> “I feel like a child more than I did as a child,” she said in an
> interview with People magazine in 2003. “I try more and more to
> live day by day, to do something because it feels good.”
>
> =====
>
> "A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation
> suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals
> how dearly we must pay for the invention of
> speech."
> --E. M. Cioran
>
> Halvard Johnson
> ================
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