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 returned to Michigan State in 1939, where at age 16 she graduated with her bachelor's degree in French literature.

She then returned to Los Angeles to continue studying with Schoenberg, accompanied by her mother because she was so young.

Newlin kept a diary of her studies with Schoenberg, whom she called "Uncle Arnold."

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.

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 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.

In her junior year, she enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles, where Schoenberg was currently teaching.

She finished her master's degree in 1941, and then went to Columbia University to pursue doctoral studies, and received Columbia's first doctorate in musicology in 1945 at age 22.

After receiving her doctorate, Newlin taught at Western Maryland College from 1945-1949 and then at Syracuse University from 1949-1951.

Newlin's doctoral dissertation was published in 1947 as the book Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg.

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.

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 also edited Schoenberg’s essay collection Style and Idea (1950) in collaboration with the author and translated into English those essays which were originally written in German.

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.

After returning to the United States, in 1952, she founded Drew University's music department, where she taught until 1965.

She then moved to the University of North Texas, where she taught until 1973 when she went to Montclair State University to direct the Electronic Music Laboratory.

In 1976, she resigned to spend two years writing and composing, and then in 1978 joined Virginia Commonwealth University to develop a new doctoral program in music.

She also worked as the university's composition coordinator.

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

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

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.

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.

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 revised and expanded version was issued by W.W. Norton, New York, in 1978.

While at Columbia she studied with among others Roger Sessions, Artur Schnabel, and Rudolf Serkin.

Her thesis advisor and 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".

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."