Season 3 - Ep. 5 Jessie Cox: Sound as a new way of thinking

Season 3, Episode 5 with Jessie Cox, composer, percussionist, scholar, and Assistant Professor in the Harvard Department of Music.

Jessie Cox has performed and created with ensembles including the Sun Ra Arkestra, LA Phil, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, and the International Contemporary Ensemble.

In this episode, Jessie and ArtLab director Bree Edwards dive into his course Music, Technology, and Ecology and the instrument-making workshops held at ArtLab. Together, they explore how sound shapes belonging—and how making new instruments can open new ways of understanding the world.

https://www.jessiecoxmusic.com/

Listen via the ArtLab website or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for joining us for Works in Progress. We hope these conversations give you a glimpse into the creativity, collaboration, and experimentation happening at ArtLab. To learn more, visit artlab.harvard.edu.

The podcast is recorded in the Mead Production Lab at the ArtLab in Boston, Massachusetts.

Hosted by Bree Edwards
Audio by Luke Damroch
Production by Kat Nakaji
Research by Sadie Trichler & Ria Cuéllar-Koh

Design by James Blue & Sonia Ralston

Transcript

[INTRO MUSIC PLAYING]  

BREE EDWARDS  

Hello and thank you for joining me for Works in Progress.   

I'm Bree Edwards, director of the ArtLab at Harvard, a place where artists, students, and scholars come together to explore, experiment, and create new work.  

The ArtLab is a special initiative of Harvard's Office of the President and Provost, supporting creative research and development across disciplines.  

In this podcast, we go behind the scenes to hear from artists as they grapple with big questions and transform their ideas into art. 

BREE 

In this episode, we're joined by Jesse Cox, Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Harvard University. This semester, he is working at the ArtLab to teach his course, Music, Technology, and Ecology, Reimagining the World with Sound.  

Hey, Jesse, thanks for joining me in the studio today. 

JESSIE COX 

Hi, Bree. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. 

BREE 

While you're here this semester at the ArtLab, you're leading several instrument making workshops as part of a course that you're teaching called Music, Technology, and Ecology. What's the impetus for teaching this kind of hands-on instrument making? 

JESSIE 

Oh, that's a wonderful question. Yeah, it's been really exciting to work in the ArtLab with this group of really fascinating and innovative artists, our students.  

Basically, I think I was always interested in Afrofuturism as like a model to think about how we reimagine our world. So in that vein, I decided, okay, I need to make a course where people actually practice this as well as learn about the history of other musicians, especially, of course, I'm dealing with sound, but I assume there would be other artists too. 

But other musicians who, impacted their milieu or their world, their environment through sound making, through listening, through organizing their performances and things like that.  

So that was the impetus for the course. And then I found a lot of really exciting and inspiring music and that's kind of where we started from. 

BREE 

Is it a challenge to specifically get Harvard students who probably have a lot of training, some of them, to put that aside and start making instruments where they are beginners again and maybe the sound doesn't sound perfect? 

JESSIE 

Yeah, no, that's a good question. So basically, at the ArtLab, we're making instruments or installations. So it's quite open.  

We started with making, I guess, something like basic instruments, even though I don't really want to call it basic. We're making Ambira, we're making something like an oboe, we're doing some 3D printing. So these are ways in which we can introduce people and also musicians to actually how rich in information or knowledge and craft and artistic inspiration and creativity instruments are. 

Often we, it's fascinating that, as musicians we often don't really get to interact with musical instrument builders or how things are created that we then make sound with. And they're really rich in their history and how they're built. And for me, actually, one reason why, or one way in which I became aware of this was that I was trying to create a 3D printed adapter for a clarinet, which I call the cyborg clarinet.  

It was fascinating how hard it was to make a sound. I was frustrated for a long time, I would say, because I would 3D print this adapter, then I would go to the musician, and then we would get a little squeak, and we would file it a little bit, and no sound. And I had to go and 3D print it again, adjust the size, and then go back. And we had to do this multiple rounds, and then realizing all the acoustics, or the timbre, the sound color changes depending on the material, the density, the amount of air pressure.  

So it's actually really complicated, even the most simplest seeming instruments to make them. And it gives you a really strong appreciation for the materials and...this thing that you're working with, the instrument or whatever it is. 

BREE 

Nice. Your approach to this class and music in general, it seems that it's not only functional as an epistemological tool, as a way of knowing, but as a cosmological one, referencing lineages like Afrofuturism. You've spoken in the past about the capacity for sound to imagine new futures, and you even mentioned that now. How would you see the class and the workshop and what you're creating contributing to that? 

JESSIE 

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned this, also in such a clear and beautiful way. In some ways, this idea that music can change the world or imagine new worlds is kind of something we know, is kind of spoken about for a long time. 

But I realized that it's often more understood maybe in the sense of it's an inspiration or it's maybe the social structures change. And one of the most inspiring books I read was George Lewis's A Power Stronger Than Itself, which documents the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the AACM, which is a really important group of composers from Chicago in the 20th century, African-American composer performers.  

They created their own group and this group became a school. It became a way to make music, a way to get commission money. So it also has economic change with it. So for me, it showed a change of like the world, right? Maybe more socio-economical if we, in the first maybe instance of us looking at it. Reading more and thinking more about the materials and instruments involved in these kinds of, in musical practices, I realized that they are connected to the environment as well.  

So for example, a drum, a drum is very specific in the sense that you, when you, especially traditional drums, you have, a whole story, like usually it's framed as a creative story, it's like oral knowledge, a tradition, which tells you about how the wood and when to use the wood and how to use the wood and who gets to use the wood, which to me is very clearly also encoding ecological knowledge. So that means relationships between humans and plants and animals and seasons and things.  

By making things, we are asking these questions because we have to pick a piece of wood. And is this wood going to be sustainable or not? That's like one very simple way we can frame this. Another way to think about it is, well, can we make instruments from recycled materials, right? That's another way.  

So, in other words, making new uses of things that we consider trash. But also in the way in which that sound can change how we see a space or a sound-making bodies, whether that be organic or non-organic life, right? Or life or not life, whatever the definition might be. This is how we think about it. And actually, in the class, everyone involved is a researcher in my eyes. So creatively, innovating potential ways in which sound can, I guess, change the world.  

BREE 

And these are undergraduate students, right? 

JESSIE 

Yeah, that's right.  

BREE 

That’s great. To be a researcher is fantastic as an undergraduate. I mean, one of the purposes of the ArtLab is to create space, to provide space for artists to experiment and also for classes that can do something that they can't do in a traditional classroom. And so what you're doing in the workshop sort of fits so beautifully into that.  

 I wanted to ask a little bit about how you were educated. If what you're teaching mirrors or is kind of in response to how you became a musician, because you're not just a teacher, you're a practicing musician, you're a practicing scholar. Tell us a little bit about your own coming to be in this place right now. 

JESSIE 

Oh yeah, this is a lovely question because there's so many ways I think I could answer it. And I kind of like this story that I have, which my mom told me because I can't remember this. But apparently when I was very little, when I started walking, even already, I would hit things when I walked around.  

And, actually this was the reason why I started music school, because my mom was so kind to hear this as music and sent me to music school at the age of, I think, 3. But, actually, in reflecting on this story I realized that for me, music and sound was always a way to, understand the world around me, and also to understand myself, right? 

So if we take this simple act of walking down the street and hitting something, and maybe like a fence, and it makes a bell-like sound, and then we listen to it, we're actually engaging how we understand the space, how we relate to the materials in it, how we understand our own body and how it moves through the space. So all of these aspects are part of that. So maybe it's not a coincidence that I became a drummer. I'm a drummer and composer and scholar because I remember seeing a drummer play and I was like, wow, that's, I can't believe you're moving 4 limbs and like you have 4 brains or something. Like, wow, that must feel very incredible. 

And then, yeah, I had teachers who, you know, luckily I was lucky to find people who created similar courses or similar approaches to music making or talked about it and there are endless names I could probably name here.  

BREE 

Do you find that this way in which your students are kind of team building, I know you're at the very beginning of the semester so it will evolve over time, but I see them working in groups—they are working together to build things. And I think a lot about how people perform music together. Do you see a correlation between them coming together to build something and then coming together to perform or play or write something together? 

JESSIE 

Yeah, that's a very astute observation, actually. It's kind of my methodology as a pedagogue and also to learn myself and to do anything, actually, that I do. I really started, like the first performing lessons that I had, like music making lessons, I guess, was on Djembe, the West African drum, and it was group lessons. And that's also the first compositions that I ever wrote. 

So the reason why I wrote them is actually because I realized how else am I going to talk to them and tell them, hey, I have this idea, let's make some music together. So for me, that continued from the very beginning to now that actually working together in music is a really powerful model of how we can think about anything from interdisciplinary to exchanging ideas to working together on something.  

But of course—also even just thinking about Music, Technology, and Ecology—ecology is a set of relations, right, that we think about. So how can we learn about that by ourselves, right? We almost even automatically have to think it as like, or me and, the environment, or me and this leaf and this stick and so forth, right? And that includes people, right? 

BREE 

What are you personally working on right now or really excited by? 

JESSIE 

Yeah, I'm very excited by actually this topic too. It's something that I found a lot of people are talking about and I get to exchange lots of ideas all over the world with. So I'm working on a piece where I am thinking about this specific question of music and ecology and technology through actually the lens of the Caribbean specifically where my family's from, which is Trinidad and Tobago. And I'm looking at archival materials, but also the instruments like the steel drum, which most people know of, which actually emerges, actually a friend who I work with, Lyndon Archie, called it as a recycle, one of the, or the first recycle instrument, right? 

You use oil drums and you created an instrument because you couldn't use the original drums because they were banned, right? So this is an inspiration for a set of pieces or a larger piece where I think through these questions. And are you writing music for drums?  

So this is going to be for ensemble and usually or often I like to create pieces where I can join also at some fashion at some point in some version of the performance of the pieces so that I can, and I mainly improvise on my instrument. 

BREE 

And do you already have a set premiere date, or is this something that you're working on now? 

JESSIE 

No set premiere date yet, so please stay tuned. And yeah, if you want to, if anyone listening would like to know about it, my website, Jessie Cox Music, is the way to know about it.  

BREE 

Oh, that's great. I wanted to just talk about the unique connections between Trinidad, Tobago, and Switzerland. How do those come together in your practice and what was that like for you? Did you grow up in both places? I know you've written about Swiss culture too. 

JESSIE 

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. I am Swiss and Trinidad and Tobago, and Swiss in my passport, but I grew up in Switzerland and my family, so from my father's side is from Trinidad and Tobago. So, in some ways, this is also my personal exploration of my own story and life and my family and trying to understand what all of this brings to the table, I guess, as an artist myself, for myself.   

And I wrote a book called Sounds of Black Switzerland, which is a book that intervenes in sound studies as well as opens and contributes to some studies, but also opens black studies in the Swiss context, because they were actually, there were some forerunners, but not really an academic book that, or a book that is, I guess, academic, but also for a general audience. This book can be read by anyone. That was the goal. That introduces sort of to centering black life and anti-blackness within Switzerland's context specifically. So that's what that was about. 

I did this through looking at music by musicians that I met in the process of being a musician. Sometimes it's also things where I worked with people and they really in their work change the world. Like they really reimagine, their context and try to talk about what they experience or think or what is happening in the news or what's happening in the global stage with relation to how then it's perceived in Switzerland where they live. So, in some ways, right, this project now is an extension of that in that I'm now turning also to the—if you want to say it Afrofuturist—Afrofuturist way, which as I mentioned, I like. I started with space and then which was taught in Science of Black Switzerland as maybe social cultural space. Now it extends to ecological space. So still working on space.  

BREE 

Nice. And it's wonderful those days when you and your students come into the ArtLab, it really comes alive and it's wonderful to have all that making energy. So thanks so much for being with me today, Jessie. 

JESSIE 

Oh yeah, it's wonderful to also be in this space and get to explore a really unique way of engaging with materials thanks to this space and sound.  

BREE 

I mean, that's something that we have heard a few times from different people working here is that the actual physical space, the building of the ArtLab becomes, as we've heard, it's referred to as a third teacher. And I like this idea. Is there something that's unique about how this space is influencing your class? 

JESSIE 

Yeah, I think when I say space, I don't just mean it metaphorically. I mean it literally too. I mean, I even think about when we, when we have a drum, a drum has a space, which is the actual drum shell, right? So when I teach, and again, this is like, it's so fundamental to music, we talked together with the students about like, how do we want to perform our, like, you know, our instruments that we build or whatever we call those things that we will create in this class.   

And luckily we get to work with the Art Lab as well, which means we get to really think about what might be an ecological way to perform, not reducing performance to the stage, which is 1 version of performance, which has its place, I think, and can be useful. But there's other ways. And being able to move around into different rooms where you can, some rooms you can listen better, some rooms you can work better on materials. We also, I also find that the outside of the ArtLab somehow is part of the ArtLab. So I went out and grabbed some sticks there, which we used for our Mbiras, or I did. And so this is, I think, it's very important. 

BREE 

I'm really looking forward to the performance. And we have had—Claire Chase's class did actually have a performance outside of the ArtLab. We have a sculpture outside that is a commission by the artist Jordan Weber, who was a past Loeb ArtLab fellow. And they designed a whole performance that took place in and around that sculpture. It was beautiful. And it was also very brave because now those students who were freshmen were performing in public space for the first time. It was very brave to do it outside the ArtLab. So I love that it gets used. 

JESSIE 

Yeah, that's fantastic. It is brave and it is very inspiring. And it makes me really look forward to tomorrow every day, so that's really great.  

BREE 

Thanks, Jessie.  

JESSIE 

Thank you, really. Thank you, ArtLab.  

BREE  

Thanks for joining me for this episode of Works in Progress. We hope these conversations give you a glimpse into the creativity and experimentation happening here.  

To learn more, visit artlab.harvard.edu.   

This episode was recorded at the Mead Production Lab at the ArtLab in Boston, Massachusetts, with audio by Luke Yamrash, production by Kat Nikaji, research by Sadie Trichler, designed by James Blue, and I am your host, Bree Edwards.