Catherine Christer Hennix was a Swedish composer, poet, visual artist and mathematical logician, born in Stockholm on 25 January 1948 and died in Istanbul on 19 November 2023. She taught logic at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s and later worked as a research professor of mathematics at SUNY New Paltz, while moving in the New York circle of La Monte Young and the philosopher-musician Henry Flynt.
A disciple of Pandit Pran Nath in the 1970s, she studied the Kirana tradition of Hindustani singing, and its sustained pitches shaped her music. The Electric Harpsichord, a just-intonation work for retuned keyboard, sine waves and tape delay, was first presented in 1976 at the Brouwer’s Lattice festival at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, but appeared on record only in 2010. Archival releases since then have revealed her to a wider public, and in 2005 she formed the ensemble Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage with the trombonist Hilary Jeffery.