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.

EPSG:4326

Musics Abroad: Jessie Cox "Listening Otherwise with the Sounds of Black Switzerland"

Harvard University

Space travel meets Art in a program which is interpreted in live painting by artist Adrian Arias*.

A Dark Matter

Berkeley Hillside Club

Noe Valley Ministry

The technical prowess of the Amernet meets the experimental music of innovative Swiss composer, Jessie Cox, for the festival's closing concert. They will be joined by New World Symphonys' Dean of Instrumental Performance, Michael Linville, for what will be an incredible evening of talent.

XXVI New Music Miami Festival Finale Concert: Amernet String Quartet, Pianist Michael Linville, & Composer Jessie Cox

Florida International University

Guest ensemble Hinge presents the premiere of their program Clockworks, which explores themes of mechanization and dehumanization in contemporary society and features works by Chaya Czernowin, Katherine Young, Louis Andriessen, Laurie Spiegel, and Meshuggah.

Hinge Ensemble: Clockworks

Boston Conservatory at Berklee

Listen to the Cry of the World, the inaugural project of the Cheswatyr Incubator (a collaboration between PS21, International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Cheswatyr Foundation), is a full-length piece exploring the idea of ecology and blackness by composer, drummer, and scholar Jessie Cox. Developed in close collaboration with Ensemble musicians, the experimental piece has undergone two workshops at the Ensemble’s headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn, which will be followed by a week-long residency at PS21 in July, culminating in this world premiere performance.

Jessie Cox

Events

Upcoming events

Jul 25, 2026

International Contemporary Ensemble / Jessie Cox · PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance

Past events

Apr 9, 2026

Musics Abroad: Jessie Cox "Listening Otherwise with the Sounds of Black Switzerland" · Harvard University Department of Music

25 - 26 Jan, 2025

A Dark Matter · Left Coast Chamber Ensemble

About

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