With roots in Trinidad and Tobago, musician, composer, and scholar Jessie Cox, author of Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices (Duke University Press, 2025), performs his piece “Black/blackness,” which employs virtual acoustics to challenge our understanding of space and sound. Following the performance, he will be joined by Nicole Sütterlin to discuss the piece in the context of Cox’s scholarly work. The performance will take place on Thursday, April 3, 5:30pm (EST) at Swissnex, 420 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Description (Swissnex): How does listening shape the way we perceive and inhabit the world? Swiss musician, composer, and scholar Jessie Cox, Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University, explores this question at the intersection of music, technology, and critical thought.
During this event, Cox, with musicians Joshua Rubin and Rebekah Heller, introduces his piece Black/Blackness, which employs virtual acoustics to challenge our understanding of space and sound. By embedding the audience in a shifting, digitally altered reverberation, the performance reveals how acoustics influence our behaviors as listeners, speakers, and sound-makers. A game-like, interactive score further transforms the experience, dynamically altering the musical possibilities in response to movement. Within the piece, some musical behaviours bring us to more limited worlds, while others bring us to spaces richer in possibilities. Might we be able to learn to listen to that which seems impossible? Black/Blackness illustrates how complex systems can change through imaginative acts of creativity, making audible the unheard. [. . .]
Book Description (Duke): Writing as a scholar, composer, and musician, Jessie Cox foregrounds the experience of Black Swiss through sound and music in his first book, Sounds of Black Switzerland. Cox, himself Black Swiss, affirms the value of Black life through sound while critiquing anti-Blackness as a cause of erasure, silence, and limitation. He examines Swiss Nigerian composer Charles Uzor’s pieces for George Floyd, work by Black Swiss musicians such as DJ Maïté Chénière, clarinetist Jérémie Jolo, and rapper Nativ, as well as his own musical collaborations with the Lucerne Festival. In these analyses, Cox tackles the particularities of anti-Blackness in Switzerland, creating a practice of listening beyond what can be directly heard to explore the radical potential of Black thought and experience in a nation often claimed to be race-free. In so doing, he ultimately shifts thinking about Blackness in relation to citizenship, immigration laws, gender, kinship, and belonging. By listening to Black Swiss and other voices inaudible to the current world, Cox theorizes new ways of practicing scholarly study and general ways of relating to others and the world.
Jessie Cox is a Swiss composer, drummer, and scholar with roots in Trinidad and Tobago. He is assistant professor of music at Harvard University. He has created works for a variety of musical settings, including works for solo instruments, ensembles, orchestra, voice, electronics, dance, improvising musicians, and more. Taking Afrofuturism as a core inspiration, Cox’s work asks questions about existence and the ways we make spaces habitable.
For more information, see https://swissnex.org/event/beyond-the-alps-music-in-shifting-spaces/
For more on the book, see https://www.dukeupress.edu/sounds-of-black-switzerland
For more on Cox, see https://www.jessiecoxmusic.com/
Also see https://music.columbia.edu/content/jessie-cox
With roots in Trinidad and Tobago, musician, composer, and scholar Jessie Cox, author of Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices (Duke University Press, 2025), performs his piece “Black/blackness,” which employs virtual acoustics to challenge our understanding of space and sound. Following the performance, he will be joined by Nicole Sütterlin to discuss the piece
