Patrick Behnke is a viola player, composer, and improviser working in acoustic, digital, and intermedia forms.

Patrick’s 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, community building/strengthening, and conscious perception.

Patrick’s musical involvement includes a range of styles and interests from fiddling in various folk and traditional forms to collaborations with forward-minded pop and electronic musicians, and collaborations with digital artists and animators.

On the viola, he is interested in foregrounding the minutiae of horsehair on vibrating strings, bringing out natural noises, overtones and microtones, and allowing for amplification to transmit highly intimate sounds from the instrument normally only available to the performer. Patrick also explores interactivity in electro-acoustics, merging his viola with granular synthesis.

Patrick’s recent ensemble work and sound installations involve investigating matters of orientation, disorientation, and contemplative practices among groups of performers through mapping graphical and sculptural scores.

Patrick Behnke was born in San Bernardino, California, 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 member of the performer-composer ensemble the Desert Quill Quartet, the Apt Heavens duo and the improvising trio In Transit.

Patrick has appeared as a violist and electronic artist at venues in Los Angeles (Coaxial, Zebulon Cafe, Thymele Arts, SASSAS, Noon to Midnight at Disney Hall), 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) as well as appearing as part of the Westben Fall Festival of Canada.

Patrick’s long-distance 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 Institut 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 ensembles in which he takes part. 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 as a faculty member of the Los Angeles Music and Art School, at Harmony Project LA and Harmony Project Long Beach, and in a private studio in Pasadena California. Patrick is a member of the Music Teachers’ Association of California.