[New-Poetry] Fyrp: RIP Dika Newlin

[Halvard Johnson]

> 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
> ================
> halvard at gmail.com
> halvard at earthlink.net
> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
> http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
> http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
> http://www.hamiltonstone.org
>

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