International Contemporary Ensemble / Jessie Cox

Listen to the Cry of the World is an evening-length work for voice and large ensemble, commissioned by and developed with the International Contemporary Ensemble. The piece builds a live acoustic environment in which voice, instruments, trees, strings, and electronics interact as one resonant system. I engage questions of how to move beyond hegemonizing technologies embedded in histories of colonial extraction towards alternative and speculative technologies of survival as found, for example, in the Caribbean. Taking inspiration and texts from Martinician philosopher Éduard Glissant, the work centers the question of relations between people, environment, technologies, and histories to propose a poetic intervention in our world’s crises.

A central feature of the piece is a network of resonant connections stretched across the performance space. Strings link instruments and objects so that vibration can be transferred, amplified, and destabilized across the ensemble, creating acoustic feedback systems that are both audible and visible. Trees become part of this sounding architecture, not as stage images, but as resonant bodies within the musical design. This allows the form of the piece to emerge through transmission, interference, and accumulation. Sounds migrate, distort, and decay across connected materials. In the process, what is materially present becomes transformed.

Rather than using instruments as neutral tools, I treat them as sounding bodies with material histories. I draw on the histories of instruments in the Caribbean, such as the box bass, the steel drum, tambrin, and tamboo bamboo. These instruments present systemic transformations that change both environment as well as human systems. My newly developed “Cyborg-Clarinet,” a clarinet modified with a 3D-printed adapter housing a miniature loudspeaker, for example, extends this approach to technology. The Cyborg-Clarinet allows embedded electronic sound and acoustic resonance to inhabit the same body, bringing attention to the clarinet’s dependence on African blackwood and the extractive histories bound to that material. I also modify instruments with cotton, rubber, plastic, and twine, using these materials to produce unstable resonances and shifting timbres. These materials, which are entangled with histories of extraction and pollution, are present in the musicking and their refusal and fugitive potential becomes recognizable through their sounding. Behind exploitation and attempts to structural control over life, we find Blackness as a refusal and refiguring, presenting new ways of being and relating. In the end, listening in concert with these objects as voices proposes radically novel approaches to the challenges of our time.

Described as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), International Contemporary Ensemble is dedicated to supporting living composers through commissioning, developing, and premiering new works. Now in its third decade, the Ensemble has premiered over 1,000 works and plays a pivotal role in launching and shaping the careers of today’s most influential composers. Through its bold programming and innovative curation, the Ensemble continues to redefine the possibilities of contemporary music.

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. His music is often described as speculative or Afrofuturist in orientation, engaging questions of time, space, and collective imagination. It has been noted for its distinctive textures, structural instability, and expressive intensity; writing in The New Yorker, Alex Ross has described Cox’s work as an example of “dynamic pointillism,” marked by “breathy instrumental noises, mournfully wailing glissandi, and climactic stampedes of frantic figuration.” 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. 

Conductor, Vimbayi Kaziboni

Violin, Josh Modney

Viola, Carrie Frey

Cello, Lester St. Louis

Double Bass, Randy Zigler

Bass Clarinet, Joshua Rubin

Horn, Nicolee Kuester

Voice, Fay Victor

Percussion 1, Levy Lorenzo

Percussion 2, Clara Warnaar

Percussion 3, Dennis Sullivan

The Cheswatyr Incubator and this program are made possible through generous support by The Cheswatyr Foundation. The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2025-26 concert season are made possible by the generous support of our board of directors, many individuals, as well as the Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Fromm Music Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, The Arlene and Larry Dunn Fund for Afrodiasporic Music, Amphion Foundation, The Cheswatyr Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, BMI Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and New York State Legislature. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.