R.I.P. C.C. Hennix

Catherine Christer Hennix, the ground-breaking and iconoclastic composer, performer, philosopher, poet, mathematician, and visual artist, passed away at her home in Istanbul, Turkiye, on Sunday, November 19, at age 75.  Impermanence is swift. 

I mean no disrespect when I say she probably wasn't a household name, certainly not here in the United States, but neither in her native Sweden nor her adoptive home of Turkiye. Even though she's been performing and composing since the late 1960s, and I've been listening to avant garde and minimalist composers like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Harry Partch since at least the mid-1970s, I only discovered her less than a year ago.  But excited about my discovery, I posted her music on this blog just last summer here and here. 

Actually, I first saw the name "C.C. Hennix" listed as a collaborator on recordings by Henry Flynt.  She's the second pianist on his 1978 Stereo Piano, and plays tambura on his C Tune (1980) and Purified by the Fire (1981). She was also in the short-lived band Dharma Warriors with Flynt. Although these performances date back some 40 years, I didn't hear them until 2016 and I still only thought of her then as a contributor to Henry Flynt's music.  

In 2011, the German label Die Schachtel released The Electric Harpsichord, a solo Hennix performance dating back to 1976. The Electric Harpsichord marks the beginning of her characteristic style of playing, where dense sonic textures gradually emerge from the multilayered interplay of harmonic construction and dissolution.

In 2019, the New York label Blank Forms released Selected Early Keyboard Works, followed by Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku. The latter was performed by the ensemble The Deontic Miracle, formed by Hennix, her brother Peter, and percussionist Hans Isgren in Sweden in the mid-1970s. Hennix called The Deontic Miracle “the most rejected band ever formed in Sweden” and their only live performances were at the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art during an 8-day festival in March 1976, the same event which saw the performance of The Electric Harpsichord. 

Unbegrenzt, released in 2020, is a recording of a February 1974 performance by Hennix of a Karlheinz Stockhausen composition. 2021 saw the re-release of Hennix’s Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis, a mind-blowing and face-melting 2014 composition first released in 2016. 

On Solo for Tamburium, released last September, Hennix plays an instrument of her own creation, a keyboard interface controlling 88 recordings of precision-tuned tambura, forming an exacting and cathartic electronic drone. The piece draws upon the fundamental perceptual effects of sound, as densely-layered timbral textures and continuous overtones create a maze-like sonic landscape, thrusting the listener into what Hennix calls divine equilibrium, or a distinctionless state of being.

Since the debut of Solo for Tamburium in 2017, Hennix has continued to develop the work, reshaping and presenting it in a variety of contexts. For her, to approach the performance as a dynamic process is ultimately a contemplative practice. Through it, embodied attunement to harmonic vibration gives rise to transformative states, opening new ways of knowing and being.