About Petrichordia

Petrichordia comes from the word "petrichor", which is the name of the scent released from the ground as the rain starts.

The website was founded by violist and composer Helen Bell, who has long sought compositional inspiration through the process of playing the viola outdoors, usually in nature, and preferably in a forest or beside a river.

Petrichordia was originally built to be a home for those compositions which carry a folk music influence, but might sometimes step outside the boundaries of what might be ordinarily called folk music. With the addition of David Hammond's piano music in 2022, the collection is now comfortably expanding into other genres. We don't know where it will go next, and are quite happy about this.