Jessie Cox has been a musician for most of his life. “I started out as a drummer-composer, learning drums from the Afro diaspora specifically … I was always very interested in composition from the beginning, especially because composition meant making music with others.” Cox, who describes himself as an artist-scholar, grew up in Switzerland before moving to the United States to attend Berklee College of Music. “[Berklee] was great specifically because the space allowed me to engage in all kinds of genres, and work with people from across the globe. It was a very international space where I could foster a practice of working across different methods and communities and interacting with different approaches to music making. This has become the core of my practice: I work with different ways of thinking about how we approach making music.”
“I’m interested in making audiences who encounter my music ask new questions about what life may mean and be. I am exploring the idea of reimagining the world through music and dreaming new futures through sound.”
“I think about music making as a practice that asks questions about the world or affords us to approach the world with new questions.” Cox explains, “Sometimes, this is seen as scholarship and [it] involves analyzing artists and their practices; but artists also decide on what to do and what to make. As an artist-scholar, it becomes a circular experience of creation and analyzation.” It was the search for the future of sound that led Cox to join the Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry faculty as Assistant Professor of Music in 2024. “Being [at Harvard] as an artist-scholar is a unique opportunity to think about what it means to integrate art making as a creative practice with scholarly research and knowledge production … [In the past], I taught courses that were more focused on the general history of music, but we made very little actual music. It’s a different experience to try and make a sound that is also a history, which is something that I do when I create music.”
In his own work, Cox focuses on the intersection of black studies, sound studies, and critical theory, driven by a listening-first attitude. “I believe that as a musician, my job is to listen and to practice listening. It is something that teaches us to embrace the world in new ways.” Cox finds inspiration at every turn; even the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t slow him down. “On Zoom we have no [background] sound and I find that boring. I’m a musician, I like to have some acoustics around my words so I added some reverb. That leads to the question of what kind of reverb to add and this is fundamentally what composing music is – thinking about which space a sound is in.” His 2022 piece, Black Blackness, explores what it means to create the sound of a space. “Black Blackness engages a history of thinking about the sound of space, specifically through white noise. Everyone has heard of white noise, it’s the idea of the sound of a space and in the piece I was thematizing how we make the sound of a space and what constitutes that sound.”
“[Learning to listen] is something that teaches us to embrace the world in new ways all the time.”
When Cox began the work that would eventually become his monograph, Sounds of Black Switzerland (2025, Duke University Press), he quickly realized it was uncharted territory. “I decided to write a piece thematizing, in the sound world, the role of race and specifically Blackness.” Cox explains, “This is a space where the concepts of Blackness and Swissness are rarely mentioned together in media. There’s no archives or existing language, but artists are thinking about these questions all the same.”
“Black Switzerland is a term that I don’t even know if I can say properly exists because I have sort of made it up. Switzerland has no national conversation about race, which means that people who speak about the Black experience in Switzerland use their own terms or language every time.” The lack of sources was initially a roadblock for Cox, who quickly realized there were very few existing scholarly works on the topic. “I didn’t think I would be able to write a book.” He says, “What ultimately happened was I encountered works by Nigerian-Swiss composer Charles Uzor, written for George Floyd. In listening to and thinking about the works, I realized just how deep the knowledge was within them. As an artist-scholar, I realized I can write a book about this, and I can do so through music because there is music that speaks to these themes.”
“There is a lot of knowledge that I bring through looking at music as a scholar and practitioner of music.”
Sounds of Black Switzerland examines Charles Uzor’s works for George Floyd, as well as works by other Black Swiss composers, including Cox’s own collaborations with the Lucerne Festival. “When I listen to musical works it is very clear to me from a deeper knowledge of Black studies how there are articulated ways of thinking about racism and the Black experience and what it might mean for the world to think about these things.”
Jessie Cox is an Assistant Professor of Music at the Harvard University Department of Music. His monograph, Sounds of Black Switzerland, is available now through Duke University Press.
This feature was originally published in the Winter 2024 Newsletter. Click here to read the full newsletter.