Parker Ramsay (harp), Miranda Cuckson (violin), and Jay Campbell (cello)

Groundtone is PS21’s annual weekend-long celebration of adventurous music by an eclectic selection of today’s most original voices. Dazzling performances and immersive experiences take place across the PS21 grounds with concerts in our theater, fields, installations, and barns. 

This year’s Groundtone features Sō Percussion in collaboration with Grammy-nominated songwriter Becca Stevens, pathbreaking harpist Parker Ramsay, and a full slate of artists who defy categorization. On June 21, PS21 will usher the globally-renowned Make Music Day to Chatham for the first time, with a sunrise musical procession created by Phil Kline; Annea Lockwood’s Home Ground, a new site specific work spanning the PS21 terrain; and the return of Sayer Mansfield’s Dive Barn. 

Groundtone is four days of audacious music, unexpected collaboration, sound, and community in the PS21 landscape.

Parker Ramsay has forged a career that defies classification. Whether premiering, rediscovering, or transcribing, he dedicates himself to expanding the harp’s repertoire, bringing the instrument to conversations — and audiences — it had never before known. Ramsay has given solo performances at Alice Tully Hall, the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, The 92nd Street Y, the Phillips Collection, Cal Performances, Shriver Hall, IRCAM, King’s College, Cambridge, the Spoleto Festival USA, and the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. He has collaborated with ensembles such Mark Morris Dance Group, Apollo’s Fire, and the Van Kuijk Quartet, and has undertaken residencies at the University of California, San Diego, Princeton University, and IRCAM.
Ramsay’s 2020 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations was praised as “remarkably special” (Gramophone), “nuanced and insightful” (BBC Music Magazine), “relentlessly beautiful” (WQXR), and “marked by a keen musical intelligence” (The Wall Street Journal); he celebrated the album’s release with a performance at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. His latest album, released in October 2022, features The Street, a new concert-length work for solo harp and text by Nico Muhly and Alice Goodman, which premiered at King’s College, Cambridge in April 2022 and received its U.S. premiere at the Spoleto Festival USA the next month. Since then, Ramsay has performed The Street throughout the United States and United Kingdom, most recently with new choreography by Mark Morris Dance Group. A fierce advocate for new harp music, Ramsay premieres pieces that explore the frontiers of his instrument’s capabilities. In May 2025, he debuted at New York City’s 92nd Street Y with a slate of works written in his name: the world premiere of Aida Shirazi’s A Dream Within a Dream for harp, voice, and live electronics; Marcos Balter’s Omolu, commissioned in 2021 by Columbia University’s Miller Theatre for their podcast series Mission: Commission; and Artun Çekem’s 2024 HARP (Haptic-Adaptive Remembrance Processor), which harnesses a custom touch-based interface to synthesize its operator’s live input in real time. In the 2024-25 season, he made debuts at Utrecht’s Gaudeamus Festival with Lucy McKnight’s when i am among the trees (written for a custom-built harp-organ pipe-percussion instrument); in Dublin with a new evening-length harp-and-voice work by Connor Way and Iarla Ó Lionáird; and at Montreal’s Salle Bourgie with the Quatuor Van Kuijk. In 2023, Ramsay made his Paris debut with Josh Levine’s Anyway, the culmination of a yearlong residency at IRCAM. In April 2025, he chronicled his commissioning efforts in a guest essay for The New York Times. Equally comfortable on modern and historical harps, Ramsay co-directs the New York period-instrument ensemble A Golden Wire with viola da gamba player Arnie Tanimoto; they tour the United States extensively, having appeared at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Aspect Chamber Music Series, Chatham Baroque, and Bach Ascending. He has presented talks, performances and lectures on period instruments at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Royal Academy of Music, London. As a writer, he has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Early Music America, and VAN.
Raised in Tennessee, Parker began harp studies with his mother, Carol McClure. He served as organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge before pursuing graduate studies at Oberlin and Juilliard. He lives in New York City and is pursuing a Ph.D in historical musicology at Columbia University.

Miranda Cuckson delights audiences with her performances of music ranging from older eras to the newest creations. Internationally active as a soloist and collaborator, violinist and violist, she enjoys performing at venues large and small, from concert halls to casual spaces.
Praised recently for “a rare style that fuse[s] precision and elegance with passionate intensity and successful risk-taking” (Berkshire Edge), she continues to evolve and explore. Engaging with Western classical traditions, American music, and the various musical avenues she has ventured on, she has pursued a personal path motivated by sincere interest and exploration, the expression of any human feelings and experiences, and the realization of virtuosity, craft, and invention. Her particular interests include the playing of stringed instruments in musical cultures and contexts, and the porousness of the arts of interpretation and composition.
In the past several years, Cuckson premiered Georg Friedrich Haas’ Violin Concerto No. 2 in four countries. She made her solo debut at the Vienna Musikverein with this piece in 2023, with the Vienna Radio Symphony and conductor Markus Poschner, and the live recording was released as an album in November 2025, on the Urlicht AV label. The recording of her live performance of the Ligeti Violin Concerto with the UC Davis Orchestra has also been released, on Centaur Records to great acclaim.
In addition to performing often around the USA and in her hometown of New York City, she has been a featured artist at many festivals including Wien Modern, Grafenegg, Lincoln Center, Ojai, Le GuessWho, West Cork, Bard, Frequency, Time Spans, and Sinus Ton, and by such presenters as St. Paul’s Liquid Music, 92NY, Miller Theatre, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the Library of Congress, and the Cleveland Museum. She recently gave recitals at San Francisco Performances, Boston’s Gardner Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Art. She is a core member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*).
Her current new projects include the premiere of a new violin concerto by Jeffrey Mumford; a work for solo violin and three choirs by Rene Hirschfeld; Limin’, a concert-length work by/with pianist Stewart Goodyear, to be released on Avie Records; a collaboration with harpist Parker Ramsay (including a Haas duo commission to be premiered in 2026); and upcoming performances in Germany and Japan.
Her widely lauded recordings include an ECM Records album of duos by Bartok, Schnittke, and Lutoslawski; the Grammy-nominated Songs and Structure, playing a duo by Harold Meltzer; Michael Hersch’s the wreckage of flowers; albums of music by American composers including Elliott Carter, Jason Eckardt, Roger Sessions, Ralph Shapey, Donald Martino, and Ross Lee Finney; Világ featuring the Bartók Solo Sonata along with folk-flavored recent compositions; the Korngold, Ponce, and Piston violin concertos; and Melting the darkness, a forward-looking compilation of microtonal/electronic pieces. Her album, with sound artist Christopher Burns, of Luigi Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura was named a Recording of the Year by The New York Times. They have performed it live a dozen times, exploring its spatial and theatrical possibilities in a variety of settings.
She is the founder/director of non-profit Nunc, with which she has curated concerts and residencies and produced premieres. She frequently writes and speaks to audiences about music and she earned her doctorate (and all her music degrees) from The Juilliard School. Dedicated to education, she is on faculty at the Mannes School of Music at New School University.

Jay Campbell is a cellist actively exploring a wide range of creative music. He has been recognized for approaching both old and new music with the same curiosity and commitment, and his performances have been called “electrifying” by The New York Times and “gentle, poignant, and deeply moving” by The Washington Post.
The only musician ever to receive two Avery Fisher Career Grants —in 2016 as a soloist, and again in 2019 as a member of the JACK Quartet — Campbell made his concerto debut with the New York Philharmonic in 2013 and in 2016, he worked with Alan Gilbert as the artistic director for Ligeti Forward, part of the New York Philharmonic Biennale at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2017, he was Artist-in-Residence at the Lucerne Festival along with frequent collaborator violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, where he gave the premiere of Luca Francesconi’s cello concerto Das Ding Singt. In 2018 he appeared at the Berlin Philharmonie with Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. He has recorded the concertos of George Perle and Marc-Andre Dalbavie with the Seattle Symphony, and in 2023/2024 he premiered a new concerto, Reverdecer, by Andreia Pinto-Correia with the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Portugal, and in Brazil with the Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo. In 2022 he returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic as curator and cellist for his second Green Umbrella concert, premiering two concertos by Wadada Leo Smith and inti figgis-vizueta.
Campbell’s primary artistic interest is the collaboration with living creative musicians and has worked in this capacity with Catherine Lamb, John Luther Adams, Marcos Balter, Tyshawn Sorey, and many others. His close association with John Zorn resulted in two discs of new works for cello, Hen to Pan (2015) and Azoth (2020). Deeply committed as a chamber musician, he is the cellist of the JACK Quartet as well as the Junction Trio with violinist Stefan Jackiw and pianist Conrad Tao, and multidisciplinary collective AMOC.