It was the composer Henry Flynt who described the music of his good friend Catherine Christer Hennix as “tuned texture relatively than thematic articulation”. Hennix, who has died aged 75, was a Swedish musician whose work was profoundly knowledgeable by her background in arithmetic, philosophy, linguistics and Sufism.
Her music explored sound, gentle, drones, the pure intervals of “simply intonation”, time and spirituality, impressed by her musical research with La Monte Younger, who launched her to the work of the Indian singer and instructor Pandit Pran Nath.
In a repurposed Berlin cemetery church named Silent Inexperienced a couple of years in the past, a uncommon Hennix live performance, a part of the annual MaerzMusik pageant, featured the composer seated at floor stage with a two-manual digital keyboard, flanked by a pc programmer. Within the higher balcony had been 5 brass gamers: two trumpets, a trombone, a French horn and a microtonal tuba.
A number of the viewers lay on Persian rugs. Others assumed yoga positions. The bulk took their seats within the decrease balcony. For 3 hours most had been transfixed by music that proceeded in a stately arc from a foundational drone by slowly evolving non-tempered harmonies that ebbed and flowed with variable depth, at some moments reaching wall-shaking quantity, at others content material to hover with quiet persistence whereas the following shift ready to emerge.
Born Christer in Stockholm to Margit Sundin-Hennix, a jazz composer, and Gunnar Noak Hennix, a physician, she recognized as male till round 1990, when she took the title Catherine Christer. “My mind is identical as earlier than – I didn’t change my mind,” she mentioned in an interview with the Wire, dismissing the label of male or feminine as irrelevant to her work.
It was because of her mom that as a young person within the early Nineteen Sixties she heard and met main exponents of the American jazz avant-garde, together with Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor, throughout their visits to Sweden, the place they discovered receptive audiences. Having began out as a drummer in her brother’s jazz combo, Hennix studied with the American trumpeter Idrees Sulieman, who made his residence in Stockholm between 1961 and 1964.
Whereas learning mathematical logic, biochemistry and linguistics at Stockholm College, she joined Stockholm’s Digital music studio, the place she labored on making music with computer systems. Shifting to New York in 1968, she met a gaggle of composers together with John Cage, Flynt, Terry Riley, Walter De Maria (who had been the unique drummer with the Velvet Underground) and Younger and his spouse Marian Zazeela, whose Theatre of Everlasting Music group investigated the mathematical properties of the non-tempered scale by the usage of sustained drones produced by voices and digital sources.
Younger, Zazeela and Hennix travelled to Saint Paul de Vence within the south of France in the summertime of 1970 to listen to Pran Nath carry out his slow-moving ragas on the Fondation Maeght. Hennix grew to become a disciple and later that 12 months Pran Nath moved to New York, the place he established his Kirana Centre for Indian Classical Music.
Within the early 70s Hennix studied at Berkeley School in California earlier than returning to Sweden, the place she studied at Uppsala College. She organised a 10-day pageant to which she invited Younger and Riley and at which she additionally offered her personal work for keyboard and sine-wave turbines, The Electrical Harpsichord. Her actions additionally included the efficiency of the primary of a number of theatre productions within the Japanese Noh model.
In 1978 she accepted a place as a professor of arithmetic and pc science on the State College of New York at New Paltz, whereas additionally working on the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise’s synthetic intelligence laboratory and making a recording with Flynt underneath the title of the Dharma Warriors. After a 12 months she returned to Europe, learning Lacanian psychoanalysis in Paris and endeavor analysis at Amsterdam College’s institute for logic, language and computation.
A revival of her recording and performing profession started in 2005 when, after assembly the Berlin-based English trombonist Hilary Jeffrey, she fashioned an ensemble referred to as the Chora(s)san Time-Courtroom Mirage. There was additional curiosity when, with Flynt’s encouragement, the unique recording of The Electrical Harpsichord was launched for the primary time in 2010, adopted by the discharge of additional music from the identical occasion by her three-piece the Deontic Miracle, that includes renaissance oboe and Chinese language sheng.
The Chora(s)san Time-Courtroom Mirage ensemble’s efficiency of her piece Blues Dhikr Al-Salam on the Grimmuseum in Berlin in 2011, celebrating Younger’s seventieth birthday, was additionally later launched as an album, as was a efficiency on the Difficulty Mission Room in New York through the Ultima pageant in 2014, wherein the group included the trumpeter Amir ElSaffar and the singer Amirtha Kidambi. Solo for Tamburium, recorded in Berlin in 2017 and sending the sound of 88 Indian tamburas by a keyboard interface, was launched this 12 months.
An exhibition of her visible artwork, referred to as Traversée du Fantasme, begun together with her then accomplice, the photographer Lena Tuzzolino, within the 90s and resembling colored renditions of mechanical punched playing cards, was exhibited in 2018 on the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam and the Empty gallery in Hong Kong. Her books and essays included Poësy Issues and Different Issues, a two-volume assortment printed in 2019.
Concerned in Sufism since her research with Pran Nath, Hennix made a proper conversion to Islam earlier than shifting for her ultimate years to Istanbul.
