“She draws unbelievably beautiful sonorities from the piano”
—2MBS Fine Music Magazine, 2011
“Jocelyn’s playing embodies the essence of what it is to be a true, accomplished artist.”
—Australian National Piano Award Jury Panel, 2010
“…a consistent performer with precise rhythmic execution and a surprisingly unrelenting physical technique given her slight frame. A committed contemporary music exponent, she relished the mechanised drive of Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (from North American Ballads)…”
—Eamonn Kelly, The Australian, September 15, 2008
“Jocelyn Ho’s performance of my tango was superb, elegant – better than any of the commercial recordings of it currently available.”
—Chester Biscardi, 2004
Hailed as an artist possessing “a surprisingly unrelenting physical technique” (The Australian) and “drawing unbelievably beautiful sonorities from the piano” (Fine Music Magazine), Jocelyn Ho has distinguished herself as one of the leading young pianists in Australia. Born in Hong Kong, Jocelyn Ho started piano at the early age of five and continued her piano studies when she immigrated to Sydney two years later. After scoring a perfect University Admission Index and topping the state of New South Wales in the Higher School Certificate, she embarked on a medical degree with a scholarship, only to find her musical and mathematical desires unfulfilled. Consequently, she took on three majors simultaneously — pure mathematics and computer science at the University of New South Wales, and music at the University of Sydney.
Since then, Jocelyn Ho has won major piano competitions in Australia and overseas, including the first prize and the special prize for music by Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven in the 2010 Australian National Piano Award. She has also won the Sydney Conservatorium Concerto Competition, the Kawai Award, and has performed at the Sydney Opera House, the Dame Elizabeth Murdoch Hall at the Melbourne Recital Centre, the NSW Parliament House and extensively in the USA and Europe. She was a recipient of the 2007 Australia Day Award by the National Council of Women NSW, and has been broadcasted frequently on ABC Classic FM. Her album, “Luminous Sounds”, was released by Master Performers in January of this year.
Also a composer, Jocelyn Ho has had her works performed worldwide, from the Sydney Opera House to the Kansas City Fringe Festival. Influenced by her background in pure mathematics, her compositions have garnered her invitations to give talks and lecture-performances internationally, including at Third International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music at IRCAM, the Music, Pattern and Mathematics Workshop held jointly by the University of Edinburgh and Queen’s University in the UK, the International Image Conference in UCLA and the colloquium series at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in the USA. Her composition teachers include Chen Yi and Anne Boyd.
Jocelyn Ho holds a Master of Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and computer science at University of New South Wales and a Diploma of Arts at the University of Sydney. Her Master thesis is an in-depth investigation of Debussy’s 1913 piano rolls. She has also co-published a paper in the American Mathematical Monthly in February 2005. Currently, she is completing a Doctorate of Musical Arts with Gilbert Kalish at Stony Brook University. Her past teachers include Gerard Willems and Ian Hobson.
Jocelyn Ho is a Young Steinway Artist.
