Dika Newlin

Dika Newlin (November 22, 1923 – July 22, 2006) was a composer, pianist, professor, musicologist, and punk rock singer.

[2] She graduated from high school when she was 12 and was admitted to the freshman class at Michigan State University, where her parents taught.

[6][8] Her thesis advisor and the university's department head at the time was Paul Henry Lang – as Newlin reports[8] "no fan of Mahler, Bruckner or Schoenberg, but objective enough to support a student's authoring a good dissertation about them".

She spent a year in Austria, and also performed in Paris, lectured on American music, and made recordings with violist Michael Mann.

[3] 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.

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

Newlin herself sang in a costumed performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which she had translated into English, in Lubbock, Texas in 1999.

Starting in the mid-1980s,[14] Newlin unveiled a new persona in the form of a leather-clad punk rocker with bright orange hair.

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.

[2] 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.

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.

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