Kirsten Patches grew up surrounded by the high arts. Her father, John, has been a leading figure in cultural centers around the country and currently is the executive director of the Maine Center for the Arts at the University of Maine at Orono, responsible for bringing internationally renowned dance troupes, classical musicians and theatrical performances to the area. Her mother, Elizabeth, is an opera singer and a voice instructor at Colby College. Kirsten herself went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison to pursue classical French horn.

But Kirsten is also the singer for the political punk band Naked Aggression.

She screams out lyrics like “Society tells us how to be/I want no part of it/How to act, what to believe/I want no part of it!” from the title track off their album “Broken Youth.” She’s spent as much time in beat-up vans touring the country as she has in ornate concert halls. Her audience is made up of kids with green mohawks and patch-covered leather jackets, not middle-aged people wearing pearls and ties in Orono, Maine.

Not quite Mozart, is it?

But the Patches family isn’t one to deny the relevance of all forms of art – be it avant-garde theater, opera or punk rock.

John Patches views his daughter’s means of expression as a form of social commentary, among other things.

“It really is engaged,” he said. “There’s an anger that’s expressed at what causes people to be disenfranchised. Many in society are captive to the demands of corporate America. Kirsten represents an element that refuses to give in.”

Kirsten started Naked Aggression in 1990, in response to two things: the conservatism of the music department at UWM, and the Gulf War. She and her late husband, Phil Suchomel, met at an anti-war protest.

“We went to protests together, and he heard me screaming at the cops and at people,” Patches said. “He said ‘you should be in a band’.

“He was a classical guitar major, and I was a classical French horn player,” she said. “I’d never sung before, other than in a church choir. But we started writing anti-war songs. And then I quit the music department and became a performance art major.”

John and Elizabeth came to Maine from New York in 1992, when John was hired as the MCA director, where he started out by bringing luminaries such as Itzhak Perlman and an acclaimed touring production of “La Traviata” to Maine. Elizabeth, a classical purist and a powerful mezzo-soprano, was now at Colby, and had been performing in the area for several years.

By that time Kirsten and Phil and the rest of the band had relocated to Hollywood, and had released several 7-inch singles and one full length, “Bitter Youth”.

“Bitter Youth” is an underground classic of ’90s California punk – raw, angry and violent, it’s in the same family as earlier bands like the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and X. Naked Aggression never achieved the kind of above-the-radar success that bands like Bad Religion and NOFX did, but they toured everywhere, they made a lot of music, and they never lost their indie spirit or their political fire. Basically, they never sold out.

It’s a long cultural road from Chopin to the Circle Jerks. How does someone weaned on classical music switch gears and start a punk rock band?

“My dad’s always been very progressive,” Kirsten said. “He’s always liked something different. He’s just at a different end of the arts. He doesn’t like the status quo, the boring routine. I’d say I’m like him in that respect.

“And my Mom and I, well, we’re both singers,” she continued. “We just use different techniques.”

John and Elizabeth eventually came to embrace Kirsten’s music and lifestyle.

“Mrs. Patches [Elizabeth] is certainly not a rock music fan,” John said. “But we’ve seen the band perform, and it really is fascinating to watch. The whole environment is just otherworldly, the way the crowd behaves. We’re in the classical tradition, so it’s very different for us.”

Kirsten put the band on hold in 1998 when her husband and band mate Phil died tragically from an asthma attack. She’s since gone back to college, and now is a special-education teacher in the inner-city schools of Los Angeles. Since the second Iraq War, she’s felt creatively invigorated and inspired to make music again. She’s reformed the band and has released a compilation of old and rare Naked Aggression material on S.O.S. Records, and is in the process of releasing an album of entirely new songs.

Are Mom and Dad proud of their daughter?

Of course they are.

“We wouldn’t use the language she uses to express her message,” John said. “But the message is fundamentally there. And her punk rock experience has prepared her to work in the inner city, so she’s really living out her commitment to staying active [socially and politically].”

Kirsten thinks she and her parents aren’t really so different.

“We both think we can change people’s minds for the better with art,” she said. “Even though it’s a different approach, it’s the same idea. We highly idealize the power of art. That’s something I stress a lot.”