Catherine Christer Hennix, Swedish Experimental Musician, Dies at 75

Catherine Christer Hennix, a Swedish polymath and pioneer of drone music, has died. She was 75 years outdated. The experimental music non-profit Blank Forms, a frequent distributor of Hennix’ music, announced her demise on Friday (November 17). The New York Times studies Hennix’ reason behind demise as issues of an undisclosed sickness. The artist had acquired remedy for most cancers prior to now.

Born to a jazz composer mom in Stockholm in 1946, Hennix started taking part in drums as a toddler and began taking formal classes at 13, across the identical time that she would hear John Coltrane and Miles Davis carry out stay for the primary time. She began crafting compositions on the computer systems at Stockholm’s Electrical Music Studio (ESM) in 1969, a pastime that fostered a ardour for logic and arithmetic, which she pursued to the graduate stage. Throughout her profession, she additionally taught arithmetic at SUNY New Paltz and served as a visiting Professor of Logic at MIT’s Manmade Intellegence Laboratory.

Hennix’s work with drones traces again to her immersion in New York’s downtown music scene within the late Sixties, which she sought out as a Coltrane- and Stockhausen-influenced Stockholm College linguistics graduate. She linked with minimalist composer La Monte Younger, and later recalled in a 2010 interview that upon listening to Younger’s music it solely took her “about 60 seconds to resolve that this was the sound.” Whereas persevering with to experiment with synthesizers, drones, and simply intonation, an alternative choice to customary Western tuning, Hennix additionally composed poetry, drama, and equations. Her diverse pursuits ultimately led her to prepare a ten day competition known as Brouwer’s Lattice at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 1976, which showcased Hennix’s work alongside different minimalist artists.

It was at that competition that she carried out “The Electric Harpsichord,” one among her most well-known compositions. Over a relentless underlying drone, Hennix improvised on a Yamaha keyboard scaled to simply intonation and fed the outcomes via a tape delay. The recording of the efficiency runs 25 minutes, however Hennix envisioned the piece to don’t have any ending, an instance of her self-described infinitary composition. The artist Henry Flynt, who Hennix labored with usually through the years, known as the piece as a “life-changing revelation.”