Harvard Percussionist and Composer Jessie Cox

An experimental percussionist-composer pushing the limits of music

Jesse Cox smiling at a table with music notes and a book, with drums and cymbals behind him

Jessie Cox  |  Photograph by Stu Rosner

“I follow sounds,” says percussionist-composer Jessie Cox, who joined Harvard last fall as an assistant professor of music. “For me, playing music, or finding a new sound, is about hearing something that was unthinkable.” That’s an apt statement. Cox’s compositions often feel like a leap into the unknown: wildly, playfully, disquietingly experimental, crossing genres and geographies and pushing the limits of what counts as an instrument. He’s interested in the sounds of extinct birds and the oral histories embedded in traditional drums. He once wrapped cotton around instruments’ strings to hear their whispering, hissing overtones. (Rubber bands, he found, elicit a bell-like sound.) A graduate of the Berklee College of Music and Columbia University, Cox began his music career at age three, when his mother enrolled him in solfège classes to learn rhythms and pitches after she noticed him hitting objects around the house just to hear the sounds they made. By age six, he was learning the djembe drum and writing music; at 12, he was playing in cover bands and studying with internationally acclaimed artists. He was also learning to navigate a different kind of cultural landscape, as a black child with roots in Trinidad and Tobago growing up in the bilingual Swiss city of Biel/Bienne. There’s no national conversation in Switzerland about race, he says, and no word for blackness. His exploration of the subject—mediated through music, including a piece about George Floyd by Nigerian-Swiss composer Charles Uzor—culminated in a book, Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices, published in April. When he’s not following sounds, he’s practicing bonsai. He enjoys its slowness, a contrast with music’s immediacy. “But,” he adds with a grin, “there is an ulterior motive which is musical: it would be very nice if the bonsai could someday become an instrument.” 

Read more articles by Lydialyle Gibson

You might also like

For This Poet, AI is a Writing Partner

Sasha Stiles trained a chatbot on her manuscripts. Now, her poems rewrite themselves.

A New ‘Black Swan’ Musical Cranks Up the Tension

The creative team of the A.R.T.’s new show dish on adapting Darren Aronofsky’s thriller classic from screen to stage.

How to Cook with Wild Plants

From wild greens spanakopita to rose petal panna cotta, forager and chef Ellen Zachos makes one-of-a-kind meals.

Most popular

Harvard Graduate Student Workers Strike

Union demands higher pay, protections for non-citizen members, and changes to the harassment complaint process.

At Harvard Talk, Retired Supreme Court Justice Breyer Defends Shadow Docket

The current law professor also spoke about affirmative action, partisanship, and the limits of “bright-line rules.”

Harvard Alumni Honored for University Service

The 2026 Harvard Medal recipients will be honored on June 5.

Explore More From Current Issue

Three joyful graduates in caps and gowns celebrate together outdoors.

Commencement Week Events

Harvard Commencement Events 2026

Brick archway with a sandy base, surrounded by wooden planks and boxes in a dim space.

How the American Revolution Freed a Future Abolitionist

Darby Vassall, an enslaved child freed after the Battle of Bunker Hill, dedicated his life to fighting for liberty.

Historical scene in colonial Boston depicting British soldiers confronting civilians, with smoke rising, in a city street.

Houghton Library Displays Revolution-era News and Propaganda

A new exhibit reveals how early Americans learned about the war.