CHESTERTOWN, MD — Veteran National Public Radio war correspondents Neal Conan and Anne Garrels join the superb chamber group Ensemble Galilei to explore honor, courage, loss, and hope in “Between War & Here” on November 6, 2019. This is a remarkable opportunity to hear this performance, which is part of a national tour by this unique collaboration.
The free, public event at 7:30 p.m. in Hotchkiss Recital Hall in the Gibson Center for the Arts at Washington College is sponsored by the Starr Center for Study of the American Experience in partnership with the Department of Music, Rose O’Neill Literary House, and The Elm.
“Between War & Here” merges music, poetry, and memoir to convey that the wounds of war don’t stop at the soldier but reverberate through communities and families. The show takes its name from the title of a book published by Ensemble founder Carolyn Surrick in 2011, a collection of poems inspired by her experiences during seven years of playing concerts for wounded soldiers and their families at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
“These days we’re not talking much about our fellow citizens who are in combat,” says Conan, who was captured by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Gulf War. “Some of them come back with injuries that are profound. We need to remind people that this conflict is still going on every day.”
Conan, who produces and hosts Truth, Politics, and Power, a podcast for public radio, and Garrels, who is the George Polk Award winner for radio reporting in Iraq and the author of “Naked in Baghdad” and “Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia,” have covered wars and conflicts around the world.
“They have heard explosions, seen men fall, and they have dreamt in the echoes of their memory,” Surrick says. “They know clearly the things that only the people who have been in battle will ever understand.”
