New York ? Dorothy DeLay, a violin teacher, mentor and musical powerhouse whose students over a half-century include luminaries like Itzhak Perlman, Midori and Gil Shaham, has died. She was 84.

DeLay, known as Miss DeLay at Manhattan’s Juilliard School, died Sunday at her Rockland County home. She had cancer.

The kindly, Kansas-born woman “represented the highest level of violin teaching during the second half of the 20th century,” Juilliard President Joseph Polisi said. “Her legacy is reflected in the thousands of violinists who currently are performing and teaching around the world.”

DeLay began her teaching career at Juilliard in 1948, earning a reputation as the world’s foremost violin teacher and a woman with the clout to boost young careers by picking up the phone and dialing an international network of managers and influential musicians.

In her studio she reigned supreme, often juggling a roster of hundreds of students vying for her attention.

Her secrets included just plain common sense rules about how to move the horse tail hair on a violin bow across the strings to produce a beautiful sound.

“DeLay is basically in the business of teaching her pupils how to think, and to trust their ability to do so effectively,” wrote Barbara Lourie Sand in her DeLay biography, “Teaching Genius: Dorothy DeLay and the Making of a Musician.”

She once said that if the East Coast were to break off and sink into the ocean, she would gladly go back to the land of another Dorothy, Kansas, where she was born.

“I would get a whole bunch of little tiny violins and a whole bunch of little tiny kids together, and we would build a violin school from the bottom up,” DeLay is quoted as saying in the Sand book.

Born in Medicine Lodge, Kan., DeLay attended Oberlin College and Michigan State University before studying at Juilliard and starting her own concert career.

Among DeLay’s musical progeny on the international concert circuit are also the American violinist Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg, the Israeli-born Shlomo Mintz and the British native Nigel Kennedy.