February 1-3, 2024
The FSU College of Music is pleased to present the 21st biennial Festival of New Music, a series of lectures, masterclasses, and concerts featuring a variety of exciting new works for various ensembles.
For all program information and bios for each of our incredible composers view our festival booklet.
Featured Artists
DU YUN, born and raised in Shanghai, China, and currently based in New York City, works at the intersection of opera, orchestral, theatre, cabaret, musical, oral tradition, public performances, electronics, visual arts, and noise. Her body of work is championed by some of today’s finest performing groups and organizations around the world.
Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience” (The New Yorker), Du Yun’s second opera, Angel’s Bone (libretto by Royce Vavrek), won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music. She was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Composition category for her work Air Glow. Her collaborative opera Sweet Land with Raven Chacon (for opera company The Industry) was the 2021 Best New Opera by the North America Critics Association. Four of her feature studio albums were named The New Yorker’s Notable Recordings of the Year, in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively. Her latest monodrama opera In Our Daughter’s Eyes was a notable performance of the year in 2022 by The New Yorker.
A community champion, Du Yun was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble; served as the Artistic Director of MATA Festival (2014-2018); conceived the Pan Asia Sounding Festival (National Sawdust); and founded FutureTradition, a global initiative that illuminates the provenance lineages of folk art and uses these structures to build cross-regional collaborations from the ground up. Du Yun was named one of 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Foundation (2018), “Artist of the Year” by the Beijing Music Festival (2019). In 2022, she was granted a Creative Capital Award for an AR inter-generational Kun-opera project. Asia Society Hong Kong has honored her for her continued contribution in the performing arts field. Other notable awards include Guggenheim, American Academy Berlin Prize, Fromm Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts. The Carnegie Foundation and the Vilcek Prize in Music have honored her as an immigrant who have made lasting contributions to the American society. In 2023 Harvard University honored her as centennial medalist, the highest recognition for its alumni.
As an avid performer and bandleader (Ok Miss), her onstage persona has been described by the New York Times as “an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge.”
Du Yun is Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Her concert music is published worldwide by G.Schirmer.
Violinist MIRANDA CUCKSON delights audiences internationally as soloist and collaborator in a wide range of music, from older eras to the most current creations. In recent years she has become one of the most acclaimed and passionately committed performers of contemporary music, playing innumerable concerts and premieres of new works and moving new music more into the center of musical life.
Upcoming highlights of her 2023/24 season include recitals at San Francisco Performances, Princeton University, Florida State University, and a performance of the Georg Friedrich Hass Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 2 – written for and premiered by Cuckson with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra – with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Cuckson embarks on a Germany recital tour in October, and performs multiple concerts in New York State including Hudson View Gardens and at PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century.
Cuckson released a double album, Világ, in January 2023 featuring a Stewart Goodyear piece, which is a new work written for her. The album also includes the Bartók Solo Sonata and music by Aida Shirazi, Manfred Stahnke, and Franco Donatoni.
Venues and festivals have included the Berlin Philharmonie, Suntory Hall, Casa da Musica Porto, Teatro Colón, Guggenheim and Cleveland Museums, Art Institute of Chicago, Strathmore, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series, and the Bard, Marlboro, and Portland Music festivals. She made her Carnegie Hall debut playing Piston’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with the American Symphony Orchestra, and new violin concertos written for her by Haas (in Tokyo, Stuttgart and Porto), and by Marcela Rodriguez in Mexico City.
Her acclaimed discography also includes the Korngold and Ponce violin concertos; albums of music of American composers; her ECM Records album of Bartók, Schnittke, and Lutoslawski; Melting the Darkness, an album of pieces by Xenakis, Bianchi, Rowe and more. Her recording of Luigi Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura for violin and electronics (Urlicht AV), which was named a Best Recording of 2012 by the New York Times.
Miranda Cuckson teaches at the Mannes School of Music at New School University in New York. She studied at The Juilliard School, from Pre-College through her doctorate, and won Juilliard’s Presser Award.
HAIQIONG DENG [High-chee-ong Dung] is a master player of the 21-string Chinese zheng and a veteran practitioner of the 7-string qin. She has given numerous performances and lectures at concert halls, universities, museums, and festivals throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, China, Japan, and Singapore. Her discography ranged from solo, ensemble, concerto, and cross-cultural works. Her new album, Zheng Tu, a collection of contemporary zheng music composed by Dr. Chihchun Chi-sun Lee, will be released internationally by Innova Record and Apple Music in early 2024.
Her many awards include the 2021-22 Florida Specific Cultural Project grant, the prestigious 2017 Florida Cultural Heritage Award, the 2013 Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, the 2012 Master Artist of the Florida Folklife Apprenticeship Award, and the winner of the Outstanding Performance Prize at the 1995 Chinese National Zheng Competition in Shanghai.
Haiqiong has expanded musical expressions by exploring diverse world music traditions. She has learned classical Indian music with sitarist Nalini Vinayak since 2003. They released an album, Stringing Echoes, featuring the Chinese zheng, Indian sitar, and tabla in classical Indian music for the first time in history in 2014. Haiqiong has instilled world music elements into her compositions. Both Fa Xi (2022) and Guru (2020) are deeply influenced by Indian classical music and Layered Fantasy (2014) was inspired by Indonesian Balinese gamelan music.
Haiqiong is the featured artist in the chapter on Chinese music in the widely used university textbook World Music: Traditions and Transformations (McGraw-Hill) by Michael B. Bakan. She directed the FSU Chinese Music Ensemble for 17 years and is currently a visiting professor at the Department of Modern Linguistics and Languages, teaching a special topic class, The Art of the Qin. Haiqiong also serves on the Executive Board of Directors of the Council on Culture & Arts (COCA) in Tallahassee, Florida, to advocate diversity, equity, and inclusivity of art in local communities.
Haiqiong received the Bachelor of Music in Zheng Performance from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (1997), Master of Arts in Arts Administration (2004) and Ethnomusicology (2006), and Ph.D. in Musicology (2020) from the Florida State University.