‘Healing’ — Garreth Broke

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 new 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.

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

‘Healing’ is available on disc by 1631 Recordings/Decca and is also available Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube. A vinyl release of ‘Healing’ is planned for spring 2020. The sheet music of ‘Healing’ is published by Editions Musica Ferrum.

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. garrethbrooke.com

Originally published at http://crosseyedpianist.com on March 3, 2020.