Discipline: Music Composition

Dika Newlin

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Richmond, VA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1945, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951
Dika Newlin (1923-2006) was a composer, pianist, professor, musicologist, and punk rock singer. She received a Ph.D. from Columbia University at the age of 22, spent a year in Austria, and performed in Paris, lectured on American music, and made recordings with violinist Michael Mann. 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, 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. 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.