Cello Lessons with Mosa Tsay

Mosa Tsay is a cellist based in New York City, pursuing a Master of Music at The Juilliard School. A student of Joel Krosnick, she is a recipient of the Irene Land Scholarship and Irene Diamond Graduate Fellowship. She performs in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center with AXIOM, Juilliard Orchestra, and New Juilliard Ensemble, but also presents chamber and contemporary music in nontraditional concert spaces. Formerly the Artistic Director of Celli@Berkeley and a San Francisco-based collective of cellists, Mosa commissioned and organized premieres of new works for cellos and electronics in the San Francisco Bay Area. 
 

Her performances have earned top award recognition at the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) National Young Artist’s Competition, American String Teachers Association (ASTA) Solo Competition, and H.B. Goodlin Scholarship Competition. She was a featured soloist with the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra as winner of UC Berkeley’s Concerto Competition in 2013 and 2015 (Schelomo and Schumann Cello Concerto). Other notable performances have been in masterclasses for Yo-Yo Ma, Frans Helmerson, Gary Hoffman, Hans Jørgen Jensen, Paul Katz, David Geber, Tamás Varga (Vienna Philharmonic), and members of the Juilliard String Quartet, Quatuor Ébène, and Kronos Quartet. She has performed with Joseph Silverstein, Danish String Quartet, Eco Ensemble and participated in orchestral masterclasses with Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Valery Gergiev. Her past summer engagements include Ensemble Evolution at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Fontainebleau Schools of Music and Fine Arts, National Arts Centre Young Artists Program in Ottawa, Canada, and St. Lawrence String Quartet Chamber Seminar at Stanford University. As a pedagogue, she taught a private studio based in Berkeley, CA and at Meadowmount School of Music as Jonathan Koh’s teaching assistant.
 

Mosa graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 2014 with bachelor's degrees in Music and in Society and Environment. She wrote an honors thesis on the topic of “Silence: In Performance and Within the Performer,” an analysis of the role of silence in music by J.S. Bach, Hans Werner Henze and John Cage. Mosa was appointed principal cellist of the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra shortly after beginning her cello studies with Jonathan Koh in 2011. She was awarded the Eisner Award, Mary Nuñes Souza Prize and is the 2016 recipient of the Alfred Hertz Traveling Fellowship. Mosa performs on a rare unstamped 19th century cello, a loan made possible with generous support from Mrs. Taeja Kim Lee and Dr. Howard Lee and for winning Doublestop Foundation’s Instrument Loan Competition in 2014.