Propositions from the DeadWIP: The Sound of Listening / Jessie Cox

Wednesday, March 31st at 8pm EST, 2021 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Sami Hopkins presents her first program in Propositions from the deadWIP, featuring composer, drummer, and scholar Jessie Cox in collaboration with Kathryn Schulmeister, Juliana Gaona-Villamizar, “Dac” Chang, and Douglas R. Ewart. Propositions from the deadWIP is a multidisciplinary performance series that balances considerations of knowledge and fallibility launching from the premise that creative knowing imbues the process of making as much as a work’s eventual presentation or future iterations. By never claiming to reach finality, the works in this series accept the condition of being always “in progress,” with the potential to reimagine the status of a work-in-progress (WIP) altogether.

Sami Hopkins has also put together a reader for each of the Propositions from the deadWIP programs. The first publication is available here.

In this first installment, Jessie Cox presents his composition The Sound of Listening: an improvisatory work that engages Cox’s speculation of a body’s potential in forming new time-space experiences. Conceived as a participatory event, listeners and musicians behave as agents in space--dictating their movement through the work via virtual “rooms” of Cox’s construction (each room hosting an assigned soundscape and suite) and thereby determining how the composition itself is configured.

Through this experiment with listening-as-making, Cox considers how space and time (loosely represented in “sound rooms”) may be encoded in the body--and above all, how a body, materialized virtually or otherwise, might alter the geographies of sensory, spatial, or temporal experience, mapping the terrains of history, present, and future. How might one listen, but also act as a listener when participating in the formation of space, explored within the domain of this time-based work?

Within the broader deadWIP, Cox argues for the ways a body(mind) might re-articulate sound events through a type of listening that is at once generative and autonomously deployed.

Jessie Cox is a composer, drummer, and scholar, currently in pursuit of his Doctorate degree at Columbia University. Growing up in Switzerland, and also having roots in Trinidad and Tobago, he is currently residing in NYC. He has written over 100 works for various musical ensembles including electroacoustic works, solo works, chamber- and orchestral works, works for jazz ensembles and choirs; including commissions and performances by LA Phil, Ensemble Modern, Heidi Duckler Dance, JACK Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, and more. As a performer he has played in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the USA; with musicians from all over the world. Jessie has participated at esteemed festivals all over the world and his music can be heard on Aztec Music’s Declic Jazz Label, Gold Bolus Recordings and Infrequent Seams, as well as others. His scholarly writing has been published in the journal Sound American, and Castle Of Our Skins’ blog, a publication is forthcoming in Critical Studies in Improvisation; and he has presented his work at numerous conferences and festivals. Jessie Cox graduated summa cum laude from the Berklee College of Music on esteemed scholarships in 2017. www.jessiecoxmusic.com.

Kathryn Schulmeister is a bassist and interdisciplinary artist praised for her “expressive and captivating performance” (GRAMMY.com). She currently enjoys an international performing career as a soloist and collaborator with ensembles around the world such as the ELISION Ensemble, Fonema Consort, Klangforum Wien, and Ensemble Dal Niente. Website: kathrynschulmeister.com

Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Juliana Gaona-Villamizar is an oboist, chamber and orchestra musician, and improviser. She has performed with many orchestras in Colombia and the US. Juliana is also part of the duo Lana de Vidrio with Argentinian cellist Violeta García where they improvise and perform new works by Latin American composers. Their most recent recording explores the sonic possibilities of the two instruments within an improvisatory approach. In 2019, Juliana was invited to be part of Vértice Ensemble, conducted by Steve Schick at the Vértice festival of contemporary music in Mexico City. Currently, Juliana is a doctoral candidate in Contemporary Music Oboe Performance at the University of California, San Diego, where she studies with Anthony Burr.

“Dac” Chang is a Taiwanese American electronic music composer, synthesizer performer and vocalist. After finishing their dual degree in “Piano Performance” and “Electronic Production and Design” at Berklee College of Music they moved back to their home country of Taiwan. Currently based in Taipei City’s Hip-Hop scene, they act as producer/performer for artist ‘Chunyan’ and arrange music as music director. They often experimented with vocal synthesis both live and in production. In this piece, Jessie Cox gave them an opportunity to develop their live vocal instrument based on repetitions, glitches and frequency shifting

Perhaps best known as a composer, improviser, sculptor and maker of masks and instruments, Douglas R. Ewart is also an educator, lecturer, arts organization consultant and all around visionary. In projects done in diverse media throughout an award-winning and widely-acclaimed 40-year career, Mr. Ewart has woven his remarkably broad gifts into a single sensibility that encourages and celebrates--as an antidote to the divisions and compartmentalization afflicting modern life-the wholeness of individuals in culturally active communities.

Sami Hopkins is an artist, musician, and writer based in Queens, NY. She was a Recess Critical Writing fellow (Fall 2020), and she is an alumna of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Museum Education Practicum (Fall 2019 cohort). Her most recent writing can be found in Studio Magazine.

Isaac Jean-François (he/him) is a doctoral student at Yale University in the joint degree program with African-American Studies and American Studies. Jean-François’s research interests include black studies, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and sound studies.