Key Roles 
Director of Performance Studies

Teaching

Twentieth-Century music; Experimental Music; Performance; Ensemble Performance; Women & Music; MA Thesis, MA Independent Study, and MA Performance supervision

 

Gascia Ouzounian has published widely on contemporary music and sound art, in academic journals that range from Journal of Visual Culture to Journal of the Society for American Music, Computer Music Journal and Organised Sound. She has also contributed to the edited volumes Music, Sound & Space (Cambridge University Press) and Buried in Noise (Kehrer Verlag). Gascia's particular areas of interest include sound installation art, site-specific sound, and the intersection of experimental music, visual art, and sonic art. Her current project is a book on the poetics and politics of space in experimental music and sound art after 1950.

As a violinist Gascia has performed internationally with ensembles that have included Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, Theatre of Eternal Music Strings Ensemble, Hutchins Consort, and Sinfonia Toronto; she is a founding member of Bird On A Wire, Biomuse Trio, and Pale Gates of Sunrise. Gascia's recent projects include two large-scale compositions that are experienced overnight: EDEN EDEN EDEN with filmmaker Chloé Griffin, and Music for Sleeping & Waking Minds, with the Biomuse Trio and R. Luke DuBois. In the latter, an ensemble generates an audiovisual environment through an EEG interface while sleeping and awakening over the course of one night. This work was featured at World Science Festival/Bio-Rhythm Festival, Green Man Festival, BEAM Festival, and NIME 2012. 

Gascia holds degrees in music technologies and performance from McGill University, where she was a student of violinist Denise Lupien. She received a PhD in critical studies/experimental practices in music from the University of California, San Diego, where she was a University Humanities Fellow. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from Canada Council for the Arts, Griffin Foundation, NI Arts Council, and the University of California, as well as residencies at Banff Centre, S.T.E.I.M., and the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology at Virginia Tech. Gascia leads the performance studies programme in the School of Creative Arts at Queen's, where she teaches performance, contemporary music, and experimental music and sound art.

 

Ouzounian, G. (forthcoming). 'Music Made of Sound Set Free: Sound and Space in the Work of Edwin van der Heide' in Edwin van der Heide. Rotterdam: V2 Publishers. 

Ouzounian, G. and Papalexandri-Alexandri, M. (forthcoming 2013). 'Correspondences' in Current Musicology, special issue on Experimental Writing on Music, ed. David Gutkin.

Ouzounian, G (2013). 'Sound Installation Art: From Spatial Poetics to Politics' in Georgina Born (ed.), Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 73-89. 

 

Selected Compositions and Installations

Ouzounian, G. with R. Benjamin Knapp and Eric Lyon. 'Music for Sleeping & Waking Minds' (2011).

An ensemble of 4 performers who wear custom-designed EEG monitors generate an immersive sound environment through their brainwaves as they rest, sleep, and awaken over the course of one night.

View programme notes and essay   'On Music as a State of Being' (2011) by G. Ouzounian

View Excerpt (Introductory video)   

 

Ouzounian, G. and Conan McIvor, 'If The Root Be In Confusion Nothing Will Be Well Governed' (2010).

A multi-channel audio and video installation of 'Paragraph 7' from Cornelius Cardew's 'The Great Learning' (1969) featuring Bird On A Wire. In the installation, two different recordings of 'Paragraph 7' from are screened simultaneously on opposing walls in a darkened room. Each screen shows 4 simultaneously recorded videos inter-weaved to appear as a single, continuous shot.

Installed at Ormeau Baths Gallery 'Arrivals' Exhibition curated by Ciara Hickey (29 July - 11 September 2010)

View Excerpt (single wall projection only)

 

Ouzounian, G. and Chloe Griffin, 'EDEN EDEN EDEN' (2009).

An overnight audiovisual composition for 13 musicians and film projections. The ensemble continuously constructs and deconstructs a 26-part chord, a 13-part natural harmonic series that always beats in near-unison with itself. A projector shows three superimposed films prepared as continuously extending loops. Members of the audience, who are invited to sleep during the performance, shift between waking and dreaming states.

View Excerpt from the premiere at Basso (Berlin, 15-16 April 2009)

 

Selected Conference Presentations

• Ouzounian, Gascia. 'The Body's Music: Physiological Interfaces in Musical Performance." Performa, University of Aveiro, Portugal (May 19-21, 2011).
• Ouzounian, Gascia and R. Benjamin Knapp. "Bodies as (Critical) Instruments: BioMusic and its Discontents." Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, Paris (October 26-29, 2009).
• Ouzounian, Gascia. "History, an Exit Strategy: Race, Haunting, and Memory in kara lynch's Invisible." American Musicological Society, Nashville (November 6-9, 2008).
• Ouzounian, Gascia. “Conceptual Sound Forms: The Event, Action Music, and Performance-Sculpture, 1958-1980.” Performance Studies International, New York University (November 8-11, 2007).
• Ouzounian, Gascia. “Imagined States: Anna Friz’s Radio Utopias.” Feminist Theory and Music, Montreal (June 6-10, 2007).
• Ouzounian, Gascia. “Becoming Media: Post-War Electronic Music and the Politics of Informationalism.” Society for American Music. Eugene, Oregon (February 16-20, 2005)

 

Research Grants and Fellowships

• Griffin Foundation (2012)
• Canada Council for the Arts, Grants to Professional Musicians - Individuals (2012)
• Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Support for the Individual Artist Programme (2011)
• Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), 2 year Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship (2008, declined due to accepting teaching post)
• Banff Centre, Fellowship for Artist-In-Residence program (2007-08)
• UC San Diego, Graduate Student Teaching Fellowship (2006)
• UC San Diego, Center for Humanities, Dissertation Fellowship (2005)
• Canada Council for the Arts, Grants for Individual Artists (2004)
• UC Institute for the Arts, Special Projects Grant, co-recipient with Teknika Radica (2003)
• UC San Diego, University Humanities Fellowship (2001-05)