Writing
Duke University Press, 2025
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, and his own musical collaborations with the Lucerne Festival. In these analyses, Cox tackles the particularities of antiblackness 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.
More: https://www.dukeupress.edu/sounds-of-black-switzerland.
Cox, Jessie. “Listening with the Unknown: Unforming the World with Slave Ears and the Musical Works Not-In-Between (2020) The Sound of Listening (2020) The Sound of Music (2022).” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2024. https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/72q0-pw23.
Cox, Jessie. “Sounds of Space: Notes on Black/blackness and the Climate Crisis.” In Hidden Heartache, edited by Simone Keller. St. Gallen, Switzerland: Jungle Books, March 25, 2024. ORDER
Cox, Jessie. “Stories of the Mothership: Charles Uzor and Mothertongue.” In Composing While Black, edited by harald Kisiedu and George E. Lewis, pp. 114-129. Germany: Wolke-Verlag, 2023. https://www.wolke-verlag.de/musikbuecher/harald-kisiedu-george-lewis-composing-while-black.
Cox, Jessie, and Isaac Jean-François. “Aesthetics of (Black) Breathing.” liquid blackness 6, no. 1 (2022): 98-117. Published by Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/26923874-9546582.
Cox, Jessie. “Music For Tomorrow’s World.” New Music USA. Blog post. May 6th 2022. https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/music-for-tomorrows-world.
Baker, Elizabeth A., Jessie Cox, Joy Guidry, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Eric Lyon. “A Conversation on Racism and Computer Music.” array, 1 (2021): 50-63. https://doi.org/10.25370/array.v20213275.
Cox, Jessie. “Das Drumset als Werkzeug Kreolisierter Welten.” Positionen: Texte zur Aktuellen Musik 3, 128 (2021): 70-79.
Cox, Jessie. “Cecil Taylor’s Posthumanistic Musical Score.” American Music Review 50, no. 2 (July 2021). https://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/centers/hitchcock/publications/amr/v50-2/cox.php.
Cox, Jessie, and Sam Yulsman. “Listening through Webs for/of Creole Improvisation: Weaving Music II as a Case Study.” Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation 14, no. 2-3 (2021): 1-13. https://doi.org/10.21083/csieci.v14i2.6585.
Cox, Jessie. “Marshall Allen and the Creation of a New World.” Sound American 24 (2020). https://soundamerican.org/issues/sun-ra/marshall-allen-and-creation-new-world.
Cox, Jessie. “Posthumanistic Organology: Problematizing Common Organological Taxonomies by Way of the AACM and the Heterogeneous Sound Ideal” Castle of our Skins. Blog Post. April 7th 2019. https://www.castleskins.org/biba-blog/posthumanistic-organology.