I’m composer and pianist Paul Cantrell, and I collaborated with the excellent Pat O’Keefe on bass clarinet to create The Broken Mirror of Memory, a piece in four parts that form one taughtly woven 19-minute musical journey. It’s my strongest work — best recording I’ve ever made — and I’m really excited for you to hear it! Here's my attempt at describing the whole piece, from the score's performance notes: “Entanglement, soliloquy, tango, flight: each movement poses a problem from which the next unfolds. Themes continually resurface, transformed, as the music reinvents its own past — the endless process Gabriel García Márquez described as ‘piecing together the broken mirror of memory from so many scattered shards.’ The coda gathers everything together, grappling, burning down — and then, from the embers, a simple benediction emerges, present all along, now laid bare. We discover in retrospect that the music’s destination has always been its source.” Others have said very kind things about it: “The music itself is at once poignant and parodic, touching the soul, yet coyly elusive. Each movement is highly expressive, even romanic, replete with rhapsodic sweeping gestures; the harmonic language teases tradition, while maintaining a disembodied distance from readily recognization tonic-dominant relationships. … [a] profound and deeply moving work.” —Eric Mandat in The Clarinet, Vol. 39 No. 3 “Paul Cantrell’s ‘Broken Mirror of Memory’ is that elusive creature that all performers are looking for — a piece of new music that is creative and fresh while being consummately idiomatic for the bass clarinet. It’s a fantastic addition to the growing repertoire for the instrument.” —Gregory Oakes “The structure and the themes are ingeniously presented. As a listener you really have to go deep into the piece to catch all actions.” —Stephan Vermeersch