For the 50th Anniversary of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme

Catherine Christer Hennix

Editor’s note: Though released by Impulse! Records in 1965, A Love Supreme was completed and recorded in late 1964. 


Let us sing all songs to God
To whom all praise is due
… praise God

ELATION – ELEGANCE – EXALTATION
All from God
Thank you God. Amen.

John Coltrane, Dec. 1964
(from A Love Supreme)

ON
WHEN A DIVINE NAME CONFERS A RADIANCE OF
INFINITE BLESSINGS

DIVINE LOVE , or, the LOVE SUPREME, is the shortest path to monism:
the Beloved is everywhere and everything –
nothing is not the Beloved:
a blossoming of a sustained feeling of awareness of a divisionless world,
a world in which distinctions have ceased to operate,
condensing all objects into a single whole
where the self is removed from the self –
a selfless, undivided out-of-body experience,
endlessly open, its interior endlessly dense with translucent light:
another blossoming of the total unity of irreproachable existence
unfolding as annihiliation in the presence of cosmic exaltation and
Divine Equilibrium – a LOVE SUPREME.

Al-Wadud-ul-Malik


Catherine Christer Hennix is a Berlin-based Swedish-American composer, philosopher, scientist, and visual artist associated with drone minimal 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. Hennix met La Monte Young and Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath at the Nuits du Fondation Maeght festival in 1970 and pursued studies with both men during the 1970s.  In the ’70s Hennix led the just intonation live-electronic ensembles Hilbert Hotel and The Deontic Miracle. In 1978 Henry Flynt formulated what, subsequently, became known as the concept of an Illuminatory Sound Environment (ISE) on the basis of Hennix’ performance of The Electric Harpsichord at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm,1976. ISE was first realized in 1979 at the Kitchen, New York, as a joint manifestation by Flynt and Hennix. For the next 20 years Hennix devoted much of her time to mathematical research at the insistence of her late Nada Guru, Sri Faquir Pandit Pran Nath, serving as a professor of mathematics and computer science and assistant to and coauthor with A.S. Yessenin-Volpin for which she was given the Centenary Prize-fellow Award by the Clay Mathematics Institute, Cambridge, USA. In 2003 she returned to computer-generated composite sound wave forms now called Soliton(e)s of which Soliton(e) Star was the first result. Subsequently she formed the just intonation ensemble The Choras(s)an Time-Court Mirage which performs Blues Dhikir al- Salam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Christer_Hennix