**NEWS** ‘Healing’ released on vinyl on 1 September 2020. Strictly limited to 100 copies on white vinyl, including an exclusive bonus track of 15 minutes. Liner notes by Danny Mulhern. Pre-order now from Accalmie Records
The therapeutic properties of music are well-documented and studies show time and time again how listening to and playing music can heal emotional suffering.
Garreth Broke’s album ‘Healing’ seeks to explore this complex and sometimes contradictory emotional process from several perspectives and is, in part, a highly personal response to grief and subsequent reconciliation and recovery.
‘Healing’ explores the complex, not always linear process of healing. Any struggle is full of contradictions: there are moments of pain and relief, tension and release, opacity and clarity.
– Garreth Broke
Created in collaboration with his partner, German contemporary artist Anna Salzmann, ‘Healing’ is Garreth’s musical response to 11 abstract artworks by Salzmann. A suite of 10 movements for solo piano, lasting c25 mins, ‘Healin’g traces the arc of grief and recovery. The music is by turns tender, melancholy, poignant and ultimately redemptive in the joyous final movement ‘Cave, Mind, Clear’.
Designed to be performed live, with accompanying projection of the artworks, ‘Healing’ is a unique and innovative project, immersive, eloquent and profoundly moving with a universal message.
Garreth and Anna’s lovely work comes to my senses at a time where I am thinking about the meaning of many of our personal and collective human experiences, and of course how art can be used to respond. How do we navigate this modern world in our ancient bodies? Does our eagerness to embrace the unquestionable benefits of science and medicine lead us to assume they are the answer to everything? Does such a conclusion create a blind spot on the inevitable wisdoms gained though hundreds of thousands of years of evolution an experience? In our readiness to ‘fix’ things like one would fix a machine, do we even notice that, if we look closely enough, our bodies, our experiences, and our collective human cultures are really very unlike machines.
‘Healing’ feels like a good metaphor for this. Looking at Anna’s art gives me the experience of something beyond my control happening to me, the viewer. Garreth’s music has the sense of a journey in response to that. The flow. The process. The carving out a path not yet trodden. No luxury of a grand or specific destination, purely the necessity of putting one foot in front of the other. Those feet finding their footing as a response to where we find ourselves in the present moment. Some of those moments tranquil, others turbulent, but always at the point of contact where life is happening. – Excerpt from the vinyl release liner notes, written by composer Danny Mulhern
‘Healing’ is available on disc by 1631 Recordings/Decca and also on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube. A vinyl release of ‘Healing’ is released on 1 September 2020. The sheet music of ‘Healing’ is published by Editions Musica Ferrum.
To seek to heal is to be human. Everyone suffers grief, loss, and fear. Everyone feels pain. Although this project came from us, it is not about us. The strength of any person comes from their willingness to confront the darkest moments, to accept reality for what it is and to choose to move forward.
– Garreth Broke
Born in Hereford in 1985, Garreth Brooke (aka Garreth Broke) is a pianist and composer, now based in Frankfurt, Germany. He has an MA in Music from Oxford, where he studied under Dr Roger Allen and Professor Laurence Dreyfus. Although trained in classical piano, he developed an interest in composing his own music from an early age, initially to avoid practicing what he was supposed to, but increasingly it became a way of escaping from the crisis that enveloped his family when his severely depressed mother attempted suicide.
Now heavily involved in the contemporary classical scene, Garreth has released music under the name ‘Garreth Broke’ on 1631 Recordings / Decca and THESIS, and performed with many contemporary classical artists including Simeon Walker, Clemens Christian Poetzsch, CEEYS, Hania Rani, Pianofield, Tom Blankenberg, Nathan Schubert, Jakob Lindhagen and Vargkvint.. He also runs the charity sheet music project Upright Editions, a collaboration with many other artists including Michael Price, Oscar Schuster and Danny Mulhern.
The Cross-Eyed Pianist 