Blank Forms and Performance Space New York present a commemorative day-long program honoring the life and practice of Catherine Christer Hennix (1948-2023). Marking nearly a year since Hennix’s passing, this memorial program offers an opportunity for friends and admirers to experience a large-scale realization of her final sound work, Kamigaku, and reflect on her life and work.
For this memorial program, members of Hennix’s ensemble—Ellen Arkbro, Amir ElSaffar, Mattias Hållsten, Marcus Pal and Amedeo Maria Schwaller—will present Kamigaku in her absence, following the sonic ideals and performance practices that she specified. The structure of the long-form presentation will abide by a principle of ethics that Hennix had formulated and committed to already in her 1976 realization of Chagaku: that musicians should be allowed unrestricted space and time for them to be able to play (only) when they feel inspired and (only) for as long as they feel inspired. Part of what this meant for Hennix is that no predetermined performance schedule should be given, since the forms of attention and inspiration required for playing can not be scheduled in advance. Therefore, as per Hennix’s wish, the space will function as a sound environment throughout the day-long program, an environment in which Kamigaku will be heard only occasionally, and when occasionally subsiding the space will be considered a space for sustained sonic contemplation while we all await the next wave.
Growing up in a vibrantly musical context in Stockholm, Sweden, Catherine Christer Hennix spent her formative years immersed in modal music, attending concerts by John Coltrane, playing jazz drums, and learning trumpet from Idrees Sulieman. In parallel to developing a rich practice as a musician, poet, and visual artist, Hennix obtained an advanced degree in mathematical logic, which would later lead her to do substantial work on ultrafinitist mathematics with Alexander Esenin-Volpin. Hennix wrote poetry and extensive philosophical prose on the ontology of being and the nature of subjectivity, blending Parmenidian metaphysics, topos theory, Brouwerian intuitionism, Japanese aesthetics, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Sufi notions of monism and divine love.
As a composer and sound artist, Hennix was part of the downtown school of sustained harmonic sound and was closely engaged with some of its key figures such as La Monte Young and Henry Flynt. For years, Young and Hennix worked collaboratively on developing and refining Young’s theories of the harmonic ordering of continuous composite waveforms, while Flynt became both a musical collaborator and life-long philosophical interlocutor. Following the advice of Young, Hennix started learning from Pandit Prān Nāth, a renowned vocalist from the Kirana tradition of classical Hindustani music, which further deepened her understanding of sound as a path to contemplative transcendence. Through her relationship to Prān Nāth, Hennix was introduced to Sufism—first in the Chishti Order, and later when taking hand with Sheikha Fariha in the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Order—and was dedicated to its practice from then on. Hennix formally converted to Islam before relocating to Istanbul, where she spent the final years of her life.
In the early ’70s, inspired by Young and Terry Jennings’s use of precisely-tuned reeds and harmonically distorting amplification in Pre-Tortoise Dream Music, Hennix formed her Stockholm-based ensemble The Deontic Miracle, wishing to develop ways to maximize the psychophysical impact of combination tone harmony. In 1976, as part of their seminal 10-day presentation at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Deontic Miracle premiered Chagaku, Hennix’s collection of works of high-intensity combination tone harmony for justly tuned renaissance oboes, the Chinese mouth organ sheng, and precision-controlled harmonic feedback distortion. Almost 50 years after what became both the first and last public presentation of the Deontic Miracle, Hennix formed a new ensemble which would revisit the aesthetics and ethics of perception that had motivated her early work. Her composition, Kamigaku, featured a new instrumentation centered around the Japanese mouth organ shō and expanding onto a section of trumpets and a refined system for combination tone distortion. Kamigaku was Hennix’s primary focus as a composer and musician in the last two years of her life. Through long periods of rehearsal and a total of ten public presentations, she developed and refined the composition in close connection with her ensemble.
Hennix’s own words about Kamigaku, as read out loud to her ensemble before her penultimate performance:
“Kamigaku is a practice of sound which seeks to mediate and draw out the presence of sound’s transformative agency of non-cognitive, enhanced synoptic activities when initiated by certain families of intervals, which are made to live together in a continuous, distributed composite sustained sound waveform in an enclosed designated space. Kamigaku opens up this enclosed space to the audible harmonic spectra that are present by calling on the generating frequencies one at a time using its instruments’ (shō, trumpet) capacity for precision intonation. The establishment of a generating frequency takes place by a gradual process of interiorizing the gradient of its exact frequency, which is being probed by the fundamental frequency of the instrument being activated for this prehistoric interval formation. This process is characterized by a gradual diminishing of mind’s cognitive faculties, while its non-cognitive faculties become increasingly occupied once the probing frequency locks on to the concurrent generating frequency, the combined effect of which results in a resonance phenomenon by which mind becomes enveloped by its interior by a vibrational dynamics which feeds forward what it feeds back, forming a conjugate pair between sound and mind’s total attention and submission to the former.”
