Catherine Christer Hennix


Catherine Christer Hennix is a Swedish sound artist, poet, composer, philosopher, mathematician and visual artist associated with drone music. Hennix was affiliated with MIT's AI Lab in the late 1970s and was later employed as research professor of mathematics at SUNY New Paltz. As a musician, she has studied with Pandit Pran Nath and La Monte Young, and is associated with the early minimalist movement.

Biography

Catherine Christer Hennix was among the pioneers in Sweden experimenting with main-frame computer generated composite sound wave forms in the late 1960s and in the 1970s she was a key protagonist in the Downtown School along with La Monte Young and Henry Flynt, with whom she has collaborated on numerous occasions. She pursued studies with raga master Pandit Pran Nath and led the just intonation live-electronic ensembles Hilbert Hotel and The Deontic Miracle. She was a professor of mathematics and computer science and assistant to and coauthor with Alexander Esenin-Volpin for which she was given the Centenary Prize Fellow Award by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Hennix's interest in drone music and the meditative, trance-like state it induces is apparent in her exploration of similar music in many other cultures and traditions.

List of works