Listening Otherwise with the Sounds of Black Switzerland
Date and Time
Location
MUSICS ABROAD
SPEAKER: Jessie Cox, Harvard University
Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices (Duke UP 2025) presents one of the first monographs centering Black life in a country that lacks a discourse around race. Switzerland collects no racial data and possesses no shared national term for Black life, yet antiblackness was identified by the UN in 2022 as an urgent structural issue, and recent cases of police violence have made this silence increasingly untenable. I claim that musical listening and practice can reveal alternate ways of theorizing and thinking and thus a site to open the study of Black lives. In this talk I demonstrate how musical works such as Charles Uzor’s compositions for George Floyd are alternate archives, where Blackness in Switzerland can be heard despite its erasure. I argue that listening often mirrors Switzerland’s national myth of neutrality through claims to objectivity. By critiquing this presumed neutrality, I develop a more expansive approach to listening, an interstitial listening, that continually sits with inaudibility as its condition of audiation.
About the Speaker
Jessie Cox is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University. A composer, drummer, and scholar, his work engages experimental music as a site of critical inquiry, bringing together music studies, Black studies, and critical theory. His first monograph, Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices (Duke UP, 2025), explores how experimental musical practices and thinking with Blackness open alternative ways of worlding.
Cox’s compositional practice spans avant-garde classical music, experimental jazz, and sound art. He has worked with ensembles and institutions including the Sun Ra Arkestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Klangforum Wien. He has received a Fromm Foundation commission, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, and the ASCAP Fred Ho Award.
Alongside his compositional work, Cox’s scholarly writing advances practice-based approaches to music as a form of research. His writing appears in Composing While Black, liquid blackness, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Sound American, American Music Review, Musik-Diskurse nach 1970, and others.