Catherine Christer Hennix

Biography

Catherine Christer Hennix was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on 25 January 1948. Her mother, Margit Sundin-Hennix, was a jazz composer who hosted American jazz musicians such as Idrees Sulieman and Eric Dolphy, and Hennix saw John Coltrane perform. She began playing drums at age five and performed with her brother. Hennix later studied with Stockhausen and was an early experimenter with main-frame computer generated composite sound wave forms in Sweden in the late 1960s.

She studied bio-chemistry and then linguistics at Stockholm University before focusing on mathematical logic and philosophy. In 1968, she connected with Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Allison Knowles in New York and began collaborations with La Monte Young and Henry Flynt. She studied with raga master Pandit Pran Nath and led the just intonation live-electronic ensembles Hilbert Hotel and The Deontic Miracle. At Nath's urging, she taught logic at MIT's AI Lab in the 1970s and later mathematics at SUNY New Paltz.

She studied under Alexander Esenin-Volpin and became his research partner; they co-authored a paper that earned her the Centenary Prize Fellow Award from the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. In 1976, she curated Brouwer's Lattice, a 10-day festival of minimalist compositions, at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Hennix transitioned in the late 1980s. In the 1990s, she moved to Amsterdam to study psychoanalysis with students of Jacques Lacan.

Lacan's seminars influenced later performances and installations, including an unfinished collaboration with her long-time partner, photographer Lena Tuzzolino, exhibited at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Her interest in drone music intersected with jazz, Arabic music, Sufi Islamic art, and blues. In the 1970s and 1980s, she played with Arthur Russell and Arthur Rhames, and performed in Flynt's group Dharma Warriors. Archival recordings such as The Electric Harpsichord and Selected Early Keyboard Works were released in the 21st century.

In later years, she performed with her group the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage. Hennix also wrote poetry and Japanese Noh dramas, published in the two-volume collection Poësy Matters and Other Matters in 2019.