About
Hailed as an artist possessing “a surprisingly unrelenting physical technique” (The Australian) and “drawing unbelievably beautiful sonorities from the piano” (2MBS Magazine), Jocelyn Ho is an internationally-acclaimed musician, interdisciplinary artist, composer, and music theorist. Her accolades include the 2021 International Alliance for Women in Music Ruth Anderson Prize for her work as art-music-tech director and experimental artist; First Prize and Special Prize for Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart Performance in the 2010 Australian National Piano Award, and Honorable Mention in the 2011 Bradshaw and Buono International Piano Competition as a pianist; and 2022 Society of Music Theory Emerging Scholars Award for Articles and the SMT Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group Publication Award as music theorist. Ho’s performance interests center on the two ends of the spectrum: new music and historically informed performance. As a music researcher, she has published in the areas of embodied cognition and gestures, music and technology, and early recording analysis.
Ho’s artistic practice involves integrating bodily experience into new experimental performance artforms, and rethinking the classical music genre through multimedia technologies, inter-disciplinarity, and audience interactivity. Ho leads and directs music-art-technology performance projects as chief investigator, working closely with composers, visual artists, fashion designers, and technologists that include researchers at top institutions such as MIT, Parsons School of Design, and Stony Brook University. As a 2017 Hellman Fellow, Ho led Women’s Labor that interrogates domesticity by repurposing domestic tools as musical instruments, featured in interactive installation, composition, and performance. Winning the Harvestworks Artist Residency, a place as in the 2022 Creative Capital Shortlist, and grants totalling over $109,000USD, Women’s Labor has been featured internationally, including at MACBA Barcelona, Design Museum of Chicago, MACBA Barcelona, NYC Governors Island, New Music Gathering, Splice Festival, ISEA, NIME, Alliance of Women in Media Arts and Technology Conference, CCRMA at Stanford, and solo exhibit and performance at UCLA Art|Sci Gallery, and has had press coverage in Brasil’s Noize Magazine and USA’s Entropy Magazine. In Ho’s sold-out music-art-tech concert project Synaesthesia Playground premiered at Spectrum NYC, she commissioned and curated integrated visual and musical works that explored the senses in a musical, bodily journey. Involving fifteen composers, visual artists, technologists, and fashion designers, Synaesthesia Playground resulted in an interactive piano recital, involving audience improvisation, premiered by Ho. Ho’s op-ed (2020) in Naxos Musicology International discusses how these projects reinvigorate the relationship between performers and audience through new visceral, bodily experiences.
As pianist and composer, Ho has performed and had her compositions premiered internationally, including at Sydney Opera House, Radialsystem Berlin, Melbourne Recital Centre, New York Symphony Space, Radio France, Boston Isabella Gardner Museum, Spotify’s NYC Headquarters, NSW Parliament House and Victorian Governor’s House. Championing new music, she has been a feature pianist at the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival and faculty pianist New Music For Strings, premiering new works by composers in collaboration with members of the Emerson Quartet and Friction Quartet. Her album, “Luminous Sounds,” featured in her feature interview in Limelight Magazine, received a five-star review in 2MBS Fine Music Magazine. She is a founding member of Sydney Piano Trio. Her sound design work with renowned sculptural artist Nobuho Nagasawa has been featured at Stony Brook Art Faculty Exhibition and University of Florida Art Gallery.
A performing scholar, Ho creates innovative analytical approaches that center on the materials of music making. Her research revolves around understanding how the body is implicated in creating meaning in musical performance, through interdisciplinary fields of dance, embodiment, and performance studies, in the fields of new music and historically-informed performance practice. Ho has presented numerous papers and lecture-recitals around the world, including at Fugitive Resonances Festival on Debussy at Cornell University. Ho is a Steinway Artist and received her Doctor of Musical Arts from Stony Brook University, where her teachers include Gilbert Kalish (piano) and Arthur Haas (historical keyboards). Previously a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at UCLA for seven years, Ho is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Sydney.