Catherine Christer Hennix (1948–2023)

Pathbreaking experimental Swedish musician, artist, and polymath Catherine Christer Hennix, whose mesmerizing drone compositions embodied her vision of music as endless, died of an undisclosed illness November 19 at her home in Istanbul. She was seventy-five. Her death was announced by arts organization Blank Forms, which distributed her work. Hennix in such pioneering compositions asThe Electric HarpsichordandCentral Palace Music(both 1976) welded mathematics and tone to offer listeners what shecastas “a sustained out-of-body experience in an altered state of consciousness.” Placing spiritual connection and the satisfaction of her intense curiosity far above commercial success, she worked in obscurity for decades before gaining wider recognition in recent years. “Hennix was an uncompromising artist whose striving for perfection was often at odds with the material conditions of our society,” Blank Forms founder Lawrence Kumpf toldPitchfork.“I think we are only at the very beginning of understanding the vast contributions she’s made to music, mathematics, philosophy, and art.”RelatedINDIGENOUS ART CURATOR WANDA NANIBUSH DEPARTS ART GALLERY OF ONTARIOROBERT LECKIE NAMED DIRECTOR OF GASWORKS Catherine Christer Hennix was born on January 25, 1948, in Stockholm, her mother a jazz composer and her father a doctor.

Having started playing drums at the age of five, she began taking lessons at the age of thirteen. Around this time, thanks to Stockholm’s vibrant jazz scene and her mother’s role in it, she saw such greats of the era as multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, saxophonist John Coltrane, trumpeter Miles Davis, and pianist Cecil Taylor perform live; Coltrane especially would loom large in the formation of her sound. While studying first biochemistry, then theoretical linguistics, and finally mathematical logic at Stockholm University, Hennix began composing works for the massive mainframe computers at Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion, working in the vein of Karlheinz Stockhausen before abandoning the complicated avant-garde style. In 1968, at the age of twenty, she traveled to New York, where she immersed herself in the downtown scene of the time. It was here that she met minimalist drone composer La Monte Young in 1969.

“It took me about sixty seconds to decide that this was the sound,” she toldThe Wirein 2010, referring to just, or “pure,” intonation, an alternative to typical Western tuning in which recurring frequencies are separated by integer ratios. The following year, Young introduced her to Indian classical singer and guru Pandit Pran Nath, a master of Hindustani Kirana music, which is concerned with pure intonation. “Studying under him altered my understanding of music altogether,” she toldArtforum’s Lauren O’Neill-Butler in 2018. “It may not be uninteresting to mention that both the blues and Northern Indian raga are influenced by Islamic musical traditions… So, there is actually a line from Coltrane to the exponents of Kirana (and Dhrupad) via their roots in African/Eastern devotional music.” Traveling between San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Stockholm in the mid-1970s, Hennix continued to compose not only music but poetry, equations, and the first of many Noh dramas. In 1976, she co-organized the ten-day Brouwer’s Lattice festival at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet.

The event featured American minimalist composers including Young, Terry Riley, and Terry Jennings, and the lone performance of Hennix’s own trio, the Deontic Miracle, whose members included her brother Peter and Swedish free jazz legend Hans Isgren. The festival was also the occasion of the debut ofThe Electric Harpsichord, a twenty-five-minute piece comprising a constant drone over which Hennix improvised on a Yamaha keyboard calibrated to just intonation, filtering the results through a tape delay. “My first reaction was that it did not sound like it came from planet Earth,” wrote artist Henry Flynt of the composition in a 2011 issue ofArtforum, a year after the recorded 1976 performance became publicly available (Hennix long shunned permanent formats, which she felt did not appropriately represent her music). Hennix and Flynt in the latter half of the 1970s collaborated on a series of so-called sound experiences; the pair in the 1980s began performing as the Dharma Warriors. Hennix in the 1990s moved to Amsterdam to study psychoanalysis with disciples of Jacques Lacan; she later founded the expanded Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage ensemble, which performed her compositions meant to show blues’ roots in Eastern musical forms.

Concurrent with her pursuit of new musical sounds, Hennix taught mathematics at the State University of New York at New Paltz and was a visiting professor of logic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. First a student and then the research partner of mathematician, poet, and activist Alexander Esenin-Volpin, she wrote a paper with him that earned her the Clay Mathematics Institute’s Centenary Prize Fellow Award in 2000. Recent years brought Hennix to wider public attention, in part through releases of her work issued by Blank Forms and Empty Editions. In 2018, she was the subject of a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; the following year, her Noh dramas were collected in the two-volumePoësy Matters and Other Matters. Despite finally having achieved a measure of recognition and thus what many would view as success, Christer staunchly refused categorization and the attendant glib discussion such pigeonholing can lead to.

“It is, of course, entirely anachronistic to speak about my work as ‘compositions,’ or ‘music,’” she toldSound Americanin 2015, “but I have not had occasion to refine my vocabulary. I find it disappointing, however, when people refer to my work as ‘drone music.’ Since when has Hindustani music been referred to as ‘drone music’? Or [John] Coltrane’s composition Africa? When I started out in 1969 to compose in my present style there was no such thing as ‘drone music.’ It was just called ‘music’ or, more precisely, [American] ‘avant-garde music.’ About what happened thereafter,” she concluded, “I was never informed.”.