Extension Division Faculty
Miranda CucksonB.M., MM from Juilliard School of Music;currently a C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at Juilliard, working with Robert Mann. Her teachers have included Dorothy DeLay, Felix Galimir, and Shirley Givens, and she has studied chamber music with Fred Sherry and members of the Juilliard String Quartet.
Violin
Profile:Violinist and violist Miranda Cuckson is highly acclaimed for her performances of a wide range of repertoire, from early eras to the most current creations. In demand as a soloist and chamber musician, she leads a busily active life as a performer in major concert venues, as well as at universities, galleries and informal spaces. She performs at such venues as the Berlin Philharmonie, Carnegie Hall (Stern, Zankel and Weill Halls), the Library of Congress, Miller Theatre, the 92nd Street Y, Guggenheim Museum, Austrian Cultural Forum, Bargemusic, Museum of Modern Art, Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, and the Marlboro, Bard, Lincoln Center, Bridgehampton, Portland and Bodensee festivals.
She has made lauded appearances as soloist with orchestras in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Her first CD recording was a disk of concertos by Erich Korngold and Manuel Ponce with the Czech National Symphony, on Centaur Records. She subsequently made four recital CDs of 20th-century American music for Centaur: disks of music by Ralph Shapey (a two-CD set), Donald Martino and Ross Lee Finney. These projects were awarded grants from the Copland Fund for Music and the Ditson Fund. In 2010, Vanguard Classics released her CD "the wreckage of flowers", comprising violin and violin/piano music by Michael Hersch, with pianist Blair McMillen.
A passionate champion of contemporary music, she has in recent years been a greatly sought-after advocate in the area of new-music performance. She has given numerous premieres of solo and chamber pieces, and has worked with composers such as Henri Dutilleux, Elliott Carter, Salvatore Sciarrino, John Adams, Helmut Lachenmann, Mario Davidovsky and Georg Friedrich Haas. She is active with many ensembles and organizations in New York City, including counter)induction, Sequitur, ACME, Astoria Music Society and others, and she directs the concert series Transit Circle, which she founded in 2007.
Miranda Cuckson's diverse, recent and current projects include performing Walter Piston's Violin Concerto No. 1 at Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra; a three-concert traversal of the Sonatas for violin and piano by Beethoven with pianist Thomas Bagwell; solo recitals juxtaposing works by Bach and Ysaÿe with contemporary pieces; the world premiere of "through a stillness brightening", a work for violin and ensemble written for her by Jeffrey Mumford; and performing Luigi Nono's hour-long work "La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura" for violin and electronics.
At the age of nine, Miranda Cuckson began her studies at The Juilliard School, and went on there to receive her BM, MM and DMA degrees. As winner of Juilliard's Presser Music Award, she made her recital debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall. She graduated with the Richard F. French Prize for best doctoral dissertation. She studied with Robert Mann, Dorothy DeLay, Felix Galimir and Shirley Givens, and for chamber music, Fred Sherry and members of the Juilliard String Quartet.
Miranda Cuckson teaches violin at Mannes College the New School for Music, and also teaches classical violin to students of the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. She is on faculty at the Composers Conference at Wellesley College. She has given numerous master classes and workshops for both performers and composers, at schools such as Peabody Conservatory, Manhattan School of Music, and Temple, Cornell, Columbia, Yale and Princeton universities.
