DIKA NEWLIN found notoriety as the oldest punk rocker in the business when she dyed her hair bright orange and sang with a rock band at an age when most of her contemporaries were already drawing their pensions. It was an improbable coda to a distinguished career as a composer, musicologist and university professor which had begun when she was a student of Arnold Schoenberg in the 1940s.
An only child, she was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923. Her academic parents named her after a character in a poem by Sappho. She was an extremely precocious child — it is said that she read a dictionary at 3 and was composing at the piano at 7. At 11, she wrote a symphonic piece, Cradle Song, which was performed three years later by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
She was accepted as a student by Michigan State University at the age of 12 and an article in The New York Herald Tribune in 1939 reported that she had the highest IQ score in the school’s history. She graduated at 16 and moved with her mother to Los Angeles to attend the University of California, where she studied under Schoenberg. She also studied piano with Artur Schnabel and Rudolf Serkin and, after completing her studies at UCLA, received a doctorate in musicology from Columbia in 1945.
She went on to become one of the world’s leading authorities on the work of Schoenberg. Her doctoral dissertation, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg, was published in 1947. She translated his works from German into English, wrote the entry on him in Encyclopedia Britannica, edited a collection of his essays and in 1980 published Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (1938-76), based on the journals she kept when studying under him.
Her own compositions owed much to his influence and included three operas, a chamber symphony, a piano concerto and numerous other chamber and vocal works. In 1999 she sang in her own English translation of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.
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She was a noted concert pianist, performing music by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Berg and, of course, Schoenberg, and taught at several universities, culminating in a 26-year tenure at Virginia Commonwealth University from 1978 to 2004. It was there during the 1980s that she began to explore popular music. Inspired by the punk records some of her students played her, she formed the experimental punk rock band Apocowlypso, in which she sang and played dissonant keyboards. It was as if in her sixties she was finally enjoying the adolescence that her early academic precocity had denied her. Newlin believed that the older she got, the more she approached the world via the viewpoint of a child.
Many of her punk-infused works borrowed motifs from, or quoted remarks by, Schoenberg. She took the words used in the fourth movement of his second string quartet and adapted them as the lyrics to a song entitled Alien Baby.
Another song was called Triskaidekaphobia and was about the composer’s superstitious fear of the number 13. Yet another composition gloried in the title Love Songs for People Who Hate Each Other, while the performance-art piece Murder Kitty consisted of nothing but cat miaows.
Her punk recordings were collected in 2004 on the album Ageless Icon: The Greatest Hits of Dika Newlin.
She also flamboyantly posed for a pin-up calendar while in her seventies and made several appearances in the films of Michael D. Moore’s works, including a role as a psychic who encounters an alien baby from outer space in Afterbirth (1995). She was also the subject of Moore’s experimental biodocumentary Dika: Murder City (1997).
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She never married but lived in a house full of cats, reportedly sleeping on a mattress on the floor with a medieval suit of armour dangling from the ceiling.
She died from complications after an accident.
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Dika Newlin, composer, musicologist and punk rocker, was born on November 22, 1923. She died on July 22, 2006, aged 82.