Research Fellow, Sydney Conservatorium of Music

An internationally-acclaimed pianist, multidisciplinary artist, theorist and composer, Dr Jocelyn Ho engages practice and scholarship in a dialogic process to challenge and enliven contemporary concert practices. She is currently a Research Fellow within the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Previous to her return to Sydney, she held an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies position (tenure-track) at University of California-Los Angeles. Ho’s artistic interests center on 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, Debussy studies, and early recording analysis.

Winner of the 2022 Society of Music Theory Emerging Scholars Award for Articles, and the SMT Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group Publication Award, Ho draws on gesture studies, embodied cognition, and performance analysis to understand how the body is involved in creating meaning, through lenses of non-Western cultures, race, and gender studies. By creating new, performer-oriented analytical methodologies, Ho provides tools to visualize and articulate performers’ bodily wisdom that are often overlooked, but lies at the center rather than the margins of musical experience. Her writings are published in journals such as Music Theory Online, Women and Music, La Revue Musicale OICRM, Naxos Musicology International, edited volumes Debussy’s Resonances (University of Rochester Press, 2018) and Topos of Music III (Springer Press, 2018), as well as in New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), international Symposium for Electronic Arts (ISEA), and Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM) conference proceedings.

Ho’s artistic practice involves integrating bodily experience into new experimental performance artforms, and rethinking the classical music genre through creative programming, innovating performance practice, multimedia technologies, and audience interactivity. She received the 2021 International Alliance for Women in Music Ruth Anderson Prize for her experimental project Women’s Labor that repurposes domestic tools as musical instruments. As pianist, Ho has won multiple competition prizes, and has been recognized for her “surprisingly unrelenting physical technique” (The Australian) and ability to “draw unbelievably beautiful sonorities from the piano” (2MBS Magazine). Ho received her Doctor of Musical Arts from Stony Brook University, where her teachers include Gilbert Kalish (piano) and Arthur Haas (historical keyboards). Ho is a Steinway Artist.