Since July, I have been concentrating solely on female composers. You can read about that in my post from July 19. If I can’t find one born on the calendar day, I won’t post. On with today’s composer.
Talk about a cross-over artist! Dika Newlin started college at MSU at the age of 12, (she’d been playing piano since the well before the age of 6 and composing since the age of 7), moved to LA to study with Arnold Schoenberg at the age of 16, (who dissed her chamber compositions), got her phd from Columba, after which she became a noted Schoenberg scholar and taught at Syracuse, Drew, North Texas, and Virginia Commonwealth, where in the 1980s she became a punk rocker! She also translated Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunnaire into English and performed it in 1999.
This is from Wikipedia: “Dika Newlin (November 22, 1923 – July 22, 2006) was a pianist, professor, musicologist, composer and punk rock singer. She received a Ph.D from Columbia University at the age of 22. She was one of the last living students of Arnold Schoenberg, 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.”
| Piano Trio, Opus 2
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Performing Mac the Knife
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| Murder City
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Heartbreak Hotel
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Kurt Nemes' Classical Music Almanac 