Patrick Behnke is a viola player, composer, and improviser working in and often collaborating in acoustic, digital, and intermedia forms.
Music expresses a wondrous, inter-active aliveness to be shared:
Patrick’s musical involvement includes performing and creating within varied musical groups and mediums: from fiddling in folk and traditional forms to playing viola in chamber music, and collaborating with pop and electronic musicians, artists, and animators.
Patrick’s compositional and improvisational practice often explores cultivating interactions between communities of musicians and their environments, investigating how these interactions might ripen into varying points of view regarding sonic relationships and interpersonal-intrapersonal experiences. This practice often finds itself at the cross-pathways of composition, improvisation, land art, and community engagement.
On the viola, he is interested in foregrounding the textures of horsehair on vibrating strings, bringing out natural noises, overtones, and exploring microtonality, while allowing for amplification to transmit highly intimate sounds from the instrument normally only available to the performer. Patrick also has worked with merging his viola with granular synthesis.
Patrick’s recent ensemble compositions and sound installations involve interactions with real and imagined landscapes, orientation, disorientation, and contemplative practices among groups of performers through graphical and sculptural scores.
Patrick Behnke was raised in the metropolitan Detroit, Michigan area, and currently lives and works near Los Angeles. Patrick is an avid collaborator in creative music, and holds his formative years improvising on viola in Detroit creative music communities as an integral piece in his artistic outlook. He performs as a founding member of the internationally active performer-composer ensemble, the Desert Quill Quartet, and in the Apt Heavens duo with bassist Ben Finley.
Patrick has appeared in ensembles and solo at venues in Los Angeles (2220 Arts, Zebulon Cafe, Thymele Arts, Coaxial, SASSAS, Automata, Noon to Midnight at Disney Hall), Mexico City (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Zunzun), Ontario, Canada The Westben Fall Festival, Detroit (Trinosophes, SpreadArt at Detroit Contemporary, Sidewalk Festival, Detroit Bureau of Sound), New York (Scholes Street Studio), Chicago (Slate Arts), Boston (Washington Street Art Center) and Toronto, Canada (Anzac Club).
Patrick’s magnetic tape and graphical score installation with Lina Andonovska, ‘Interweaving’, was installed at NGallery in Athens, Greece in October 2020, with support from the Goethe Institute of Germany’s Virtual Residencies. Patrick’s compositions have been premiered by the Contemporary Choral Collective of Los Angeles (C3LA), the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra, and the Desert Quill Quartet. He has appeared as a support viola player for Persian Classical luminaries Homayoun Shajarian and Sohrab Pournazeri at Los Angeles’ Microsoft Theater, and for Cheick Hamala Diabate at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and fiddled for the Scottish Country Dance Association of Ann Arbor, Michigan (AACTMAD).
Patrick appears in recordings released on the Timebend, pfMENTUM, Edition Wandelweiser, Preference Records, Unknown Tone, Caoba, and New Branch labels. Patrick’s music has appeared in compilations on Unheard Records.
Patrick currently teaches viola and violin in a private studio in Pasadena California, and has been on the faculty for the Los Angeles Music and Art School, Harmony Project Los Angeles, and Harmony Project Long Beach.