The music of Henning Christiansen is an odd one to describe, it comes from the 20th Century avant garde movement but does not sit comfortably amongst any of the recognisable patterns within this open ended field. It often uses a collage technique but is not strictly 'musique concrete', there is no chance based experiments but there often appears random gestures, improvisation is an element but this is not do or die free improvisation. Henning's work can be beautiful, unsettling, discreet, random, charming and hilarious. There is a human behind all this and one who's objective avoids the pitfalls of radical gesture, one which is more in tune with nature, to the extent that today it possibly remains more radical than the rest.

Henning Christiansen, to this day remains an obscure artist and musician. Whilst pages of energy, words and print have been laid down towards such radical cultural hero's as Sun Ra, Stockhausen, Miles Davis and Keith Rowe to name but four, very little attention has been paid unto the man who was the regular provider of the sonic backdrop for Joseph Beuys performances along with being a mainstay of radical Dutch performance for over 40 years. Christiansen was one of these European post modern artists that sprung out of the overflowing well of Fluxus inspired activity. Along with Joseph Beuys, he hung out with the likes of Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson, David Moss and various Danish folk. He predominately worked within the world of visual artists which I discern contributes somewhat to his neglect in the experimental music media and community.

Henning Christiansen was born in Copenhagen in 1932, he lived in Denmark his entire life, the bulk of his later years spent with his wife and children on the island of Mon. Christiansen studied composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen from 1950 - 55 and again in 1961-63 where he took lessons with Vagn Holmboe (practising a more neo-classical style). In 1962 he attended the Darmstadt Summer School and by default landed in the hotbed of activity surrounding the budding Fluxus movement after he became involved with the George Maciunas's International Festspiele Neuster Musik. This event was an epiphany for Henning who's his artistic practice and musical scores took a radical shift after he met others leaning towards a more open ended approach to musical practice (keep in mind many of the original Fluxus artists came from a musical/composition background). This is all commonplace now, old hat even. It wasn't then, and, with regards to Henning's music it remains oblique to this day, retaining a mysterious charm, moreso than say the sound of someone flushing a toilet or some other obvious Fluxus shenanigans (it's funny how the sound of toilet flushing can 'date').

Henning became one of the central figures of the Danish branch of the Fluxus movement and was aligned with the radical Danish art movement Ex School along with Per Kirkeby, Bjørn Nørgaard and Poul Gernes. Arthur Köpcke, was another significant peer in this early period for it was he that exposed much of the Danish community to the the more radical gesture's of contemporary art coming out of New York, Germany and elsewhere.

Henning started out in composition, he wrote dozens of works in the 60's, Den rokadiske [The Castling] for string quartet (1966), Laenge leve livet [Long Live Life], Op. 76 (for recorder, cello and harpsichord) and In the Deep Woods, Op. 102 (for 5 tubas) to name but three. He also made music for film and television although it is hard to hear any of these works as very little documentation exists and there are next to no performances of these scores. 'Konstruktioner' is one such work that was released on vinyl, providing some insight into this stage of his output. It comes across as a neo-classical work with minimalist leanings. The formal structure is at odds with his later pieces but remains a charming piece of the puzzle. A straight springboard in which to leap into the unknown.

It is his collaborative work with Joseph Beuys and what followed after this that would provide the most fruit from his output. Throughout a series of collaborations between 1964 and 1985 these two shared a common belief in the performance as a liberating means of expression for the individual. Christiansen provided the soundtrack and collaborated with Beuys on numerous performances : 'Rastplatz bite Sauberhalten' (1967), 'Eurasienstab - Fluxorum Organum' (1968), Die Grosse Grune Zeitsymphonie' (1980-81) and 'Friedenskonzert'(along with Nam June Paik) and many more.



Let's run through a few of the works that were made during and after his collaboration with Beuys.

"Euranienstab" is a musical piece made for the performance 'organum Fluxorum Euransianstab 82 min Op 39' in 1967. For this performance Henning Christiansen wrote a 5 part organ piece. 'Euranienstab' was performed twice only, in Vienna 1967 and in Antwerp 1968. The recordings of Christiansen piece for church organ were played throughout the performance and for some inexplicable the remaining video footage of the performance omits the audio. The piece of music is a made up of a series of bobbing repetitive deep melodic church organ refrains, Henning's work occasionally makes reference to Erik Satie, and this one in particular cites Satie's 'Mass for the Poor', a piece which is quoted verbatim in a later Christiansen work, 'Schottische Symphonie'.

"Schottische Symphonie Requiem of Art (aus Celtic) (Fluxorum Organum II)" is a stunning piece of what the ? music/sound which also re-uses the original Euranienstab recordings. Again, the church organ motif bobs up and down throughout the recording but this time is overlaid with a variety of sonic play, a hammer hits an anvil, a plane circles overhead, a grief stricken human moans and groans in a quasi musical manner. German text punctuates proceedings at one point, a female voice, relaxed yet affirmative. It is borderline whether this can be music, even today we are familiar with a single sine wave as music, noise is as familiar as pop (moreso ?) to the experimental listener and all manner of decayed, destroyed audio is accepted as entertainment. But this work remains none of these things. It seems somewhere in the middle of a radio play, a sonic collage and a traditional church organ concert. It's foreign and foreign is good (a rare bear).

"Symphony Natura op.170" (1985) is an extended collage based on recordings made at the Rome Zoo in 1985 with electronic sounds incorporated throughout. Again, despite the synthetic nature of this approach the results are a fluid sonic journey which highlights the uncanny nature of nature. When discussing this work, Christiansen encapsulates his movement from the world of composition to that of natural sound, providing the listener with a comical bridge between the two:

"First of all, I think of Bruckner's great symphonies modelled after nature, from the days of flourishing orchestral culture, great feelings and gazing into the soundscape. Which was always the landscape of a concert hall and musicians dressed up as penguins, many violins. Originally most ideals of instrumental sounds were derived from animal voices or other sounds of natural phenomena. The violins, for instance: someone found out that stretched out, dried bowels could produce sounds, there is a funny saying: "My bowels are crying.

The technique of re-working older material is a common theme throughout Christiansen's later works. Sonic motifs re-appear on various recordings, re-contextualised in a manner which highlight the transitory element of the sound. All sounds can be locked into a composition but even within these man made walls there is a restless spirit in which they remain isolated, anxious and adaptable.

Henning's relaxed approach is one of the more appealing aspects of his craft. He never positioned himself as a prophet or an intellectual. If we take a look at 2 major works made for 'stones' in the late part of the 20th century we may see the crux of what makes Henning's creative output so unique and so disarmingly unfamiliar to the general approach of sound artists under the post Cage spell. His is a music that was made in the field, not concocted for a lecture hall.

In 1968-74 Christian Wolff wrote an instructive score based around stones, the performer is asked to play these objects as a means of extracting the sound matter from within :

Make sounds with stones, draw sounds out of stones, using a number of sizes and kinds (and colours); for the most part discretely; sometimes in rapid sequences. For the most part striking stones wfth stones, but also stones on other surfaces (inside the open head of a drum, for instance) or other than struck (bowed, for instance, or amplified). Do not break anything. - Christian Wolff, STONES

When one listens to performances of this revered work one gets a sense that the players take a rarified approach, painfully extracting the potential of the stones with all the delicacy of an archeologist brushing away the last remains of dust to see what ancient treasures lurk beneath the surface. Henning Christiansen also recorded stones, he set up a microphone and threw stones into a bucket within the vicinity of the mic, the sound is so common yet it strikes the listener as unusual, it's beautiful without being profound and so simple in it's gesture that it makes the Wolff piece seem like his 'licht' cycle. I don't think Henning cares if he breaks anything.

There is a problem I have with the mid-late period GRM school of musique concrete and much of the post cage world of liberated / organised sound. The GRM fell into the trap of disguising/destroying any original sound via an obsession with technological developments that the process itself rendered the original material hideously disfigured. This is all fine and good, these bearded maniacs can chop and maim at will but I never quite understood why the original sound material was no longer incorporated into the whole. At a guess I think Michel Chion came to similar conclusions as if evidenced in his recent work 'La Vie En Prose - Une Symphonie Concrète' which relies more in the positioning and juxtaposition of everyday (familiar) sound than the annihilation of such material via sonic process. This is the 21st Century but the chatter of a monkey still exists amongst all the twitching technology.

Henning Christiansen is sympathetic with sound, all sounds. He is not one to distinguish a hierarchy amongst any of them, they are not formulated into an ambient gloop or twisted into extreme shapes, rather the rattle of a piano's low end can sit alongside fried electronics, the reverb drenched conversation of a large acoustic space is on par with a blacksmith bashing hammer on anvil. The human voice recites text in a calm yet affirmative manner or may re-framed as parody via varispeed tape manipulation. A Christiansen recording, any Christiansen recording may encompass multi-lingual voices, stones and vacuum cleaners, hammers, coins in a glass bowl, footsteps on gravel, a bullfrog, rocks in a box, 100 blows with a hammer, a pipe, a blood pipe, under pressure, a canary, sheep and hens. There is a genuine love of sound here but one which is captured in the natural world, not dissected in the concert hall.

Of course any distinction between high and low culture was dismantled so long ago so that a man writing for a string quartet in one decade and recording stones being thrown in the next is hardly surprising, but what stands it here is how smooth the transition was. There is a no 'pain' in the work of Christiansen, no patronising screams of the infant child being torn from the remaining fragments of 'the old world'. Henning's work has a symbiotic relationship with the 'weird' - a natural tendency to explore unpopulated parameters of musical practice elevates him above those that intend to provoke with conscious shifts in formal identity. He is enjoying himself and the listener cannot help but join him in this celebration. His works survive as documents despite being constructed for performance.

Some insight into the origins of his practice and the unusual results later in his career can be gained from his original formal training :

"I feel most of what I have done is based on the academic, the classical. What I learned at the Conservatory has had tremendous significance. To me, the classical is the accumulated experience on how to form a work of art freely floating in space, so that it's linked to the nature that surrounds us and is within mankind. Earlier, I said "man is also nature, it's a synthesis".


Henning's music has a unique vision that remains elusive and mysterious to this day. Why he is never mentioned in any history of 20th Century experimental music or sound art literature is beyond me. I was in a bookstore recently and glanced through the index of yet another new book on the what is obviously a budding new market, that of 'sound art' and again the roster of subjects discussed is as predictable as the queen's speech at Christmas. All of those who are cited again and again by lazy academics who prefer to reiterate the obvious then truly explore under the cracks and in amongst the walls.

Henning Christiansen was an explorer, one who carried on his journey throughout all of his adult life, uncovering the dirt under the rocks and discovering that the matter there can be as poignant as that which sits above it.