Dika Newlin

Dika 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, 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.

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.

Newlin was able to read the dictionary by age 3. She could play the piano by age 6, and began composing music at age 7. When she was 11 she wrote a symphonic piece, Cradle Song, that was performed three years later by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

She entered elementary school at age 5 and finished it at age 8. She graduated from high school when she was 12 and was admitted to the freshman class at Michigan State University, where her parents taught.

After graduating from Michigan State at age 16, she and her mother moved to Los Angeles so that she could study with Schoenberg at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

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 (1938-76) (New York: Pendragon Press, 1980).

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?"

Newlin later wrote a biography of Schoenberg for the Encyclopædia Britannica, in addition to many other articles and translations on musical subjects.

Newlin, among the last surviving students of Schoenberg, was "one of the pioneers of Schoenberg research in America," according to Dr. Sabine Feisst, a professor of musicology at Arizona State University. Newlin's doctoral dissertation for Columbia University , where she was admitted in 1941 after moving to New York City, was published in 1947 as the book Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg. A revised and expanded version was issued by W.W. Norton, New York, in 1978. While at Columbia she studied with among others Roger Sessions. The university's department head at the time was Paul Henry Lang - as Newlin reports no fan of Mahler, Bruckner or Schoenberg, but objective enough to support a student's authoring a good dissertation about them.

Newlin's compositions include three operas, a piano concerto, a chamber symphony, and numerous chamber, vocal and mixed-media works.

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.

That same year, Moore directed the documentary about Newlin titled Dika: Murder City. The title was taken from a song Newlin had performed in her solo "cabaret" act for a few years before it became a popular performance piece for her band ApoCowLypso, formed in 1985 with fellow area singer/songwriters Brooke Saunders and Manko Eponymous as well as Hunter Duke on drums. 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.

Teaching positions

• 1949–1951 – music faculty, Syracuse University
• 1952–1964 – music faculty, Drew University
• 1965–1973 – Composition faculty, University of North Texas College of Music
• 1978-2004 – music faculty, Virginia Commonwealth University

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.

On 13 August 1964 Newlin was in London for the premiere of the full-length Performing Version of Mahler's unfinished 10th Symphony prepared by Deryck Cooke. After the performance, she presented Cooke with the Kilenyi Mahler Medal of the Bruckner Society of America.

Newlin posed for a pinup calendar when she was in her seventies.

Reporters who interviewed her at home noted that a medieval suit of armor was suspended over her mattress on the floor of her bedroom.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Dika Newlin could often be seen in Richmond wheeling her papers and other belongings along the sidewalk of Grace Street in a shopping cart, between her teaching job at VCU and her columnist job at Richmond Newspapers, some 12 blocks away. She would typically be wearing a gaudy dress and gaudier red lipstick and by the end of the walk would be huffing and puffing from the exertion. This comical image she presented in these daily walks caused her to be known locally as "The Bag Lady of Music".

Newlin died in Richmond, Virginia from complications of a broken arm she suffered in an accident on June 30, 2006.

• 'A Final Musical Testament', The New Leader, 14 Sept 1964, 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). ISBN 0-918728-14-2.