Entf. (Backspace)

Join us for a listening session and discussion of Yvette Janine Jackson’s radio opera Entf. (Backspace) commissioned by Cashmere Radio for Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Share this special listening experience of Jackson's most recent radio opera in a comfortable setting with Jackson in person. Following the session, Jackson talks with drummer/composer/schols Jessie Cox about her work, inspiration, working in Germany and what exactly a radio operas is. LIght refreshments will be available during the event.

Jackson’s radio operas are abstract narrative compositions that leave room listeners to form their own connections and interpretations. Listeners are encouraged to get comfortable, close their eyes, and let the journey unfold.

Entf. (Backspace) was composed at the Visby International Centre for Composers in Sweden and features Jackson’s Radio Opera Workshop: Tommy Babin (bass), Amy Cimini (electric viola), Judith Hamann (cello), Jonathan Piper (tuba), Mali Irene (voice), leo (voice), Bär Kittelmann (voice), and Nino Bulling (voice). The broadcast premiere is September 5, 2025.

Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer and installation artist who draws on her background in theatrical sound design to create “radio operas,” an aesthetic of narrative soundscape composition described by The Guardian as “immersive non-visual films.”

Recent projects include Hello, Tomorrow! for orchestra and electronics co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and American Composers Orchestra; and T-Minus, A Radio Opera commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble. Her permanent installations Underground (Codes) and Destination Freedom can be experienced at Wave Farm in Acra, New York, and the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.

Jackson is a recipient of the 2025 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and the Giga-Hertz Production Award presented by ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and SWR Experimentalstudio. She has contributed to the bilingual publication Composing While Black: Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute / Afrodiasporic New Music Today (Wolke Verlag, 2023). She is an associate professor in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry in the Department of Music at Harvard University.

Jessie Cox is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University and received his doctorate from Columbia University. Active as a composer, drummer, and scholar, his work thematizes questions at the intersection of black studies, music/sound studies, and critical theory. From Switzerland, with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, Cox thinks through questions of race, migration, national belonging, and our relation to the planet and the cosmos. His first monographSounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices(Duke UP, 2025) addresses how thinking with blackness and experimental musical practices might afford the opening of new discourses, such as thematizing Black Swiss Life.

Through avant-garde classical, experimental jazz, and sound art, he has devised his own strand of musical science fiction, one that asks where we go next. He is influenced by a vast array of artists who have used their music to imagine futures, and takes Afrofuturism as a core inspiration, asking questions about existence, and the ways we make spaces habitable. Known for its disquieting tone and unexpected structural changes, his music steps into the unknown, and has been referred to by the
New Yorker(Alex Ross) as an example of “dynamic pointillism,” a nebulous and ever-expanding sound world that includes “breathy instrumental noises, mournfully wailing glissandi, and climactic stampedes of frantic figuration.”

A dedicated collaborator, Cox has worked as a composer and drummer with ensembles such as the Sun Ra Arkestra, LA Phil, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, and the International Contemporary Ensemble; at Festivals such as theLucerne Festival,MaerzMusik, andOpera Omaha. For his work as a composer, he has been recognized with a
Fromm Foundation commission, the ASCAP Fred Ho Award, and his commissions have been funded by the Ernst von Siemens Foundation,Pro Helvetia, New Music USA, and others. 

His scholarly writing asks new questions about our world through music. Recently, he has published in and co-translated the bookComposing While Black, published as a bilingual edition in German and English by Wolke Verlag in 2023. Further texts appear inliquid blackness,Critical Studies in Improvisation, Positionen Texte zur Aktuellen Musik, Sound American, the American Music Review, and others.