Healing With Music And Words

War and music — trauma and healing — musicians and journalists — are unlikely, but not discordant alliances. Next week in Norfolk and Hartford we will find these forces performing together in “Between War and Here” a program of music and narration featuring the Celtic music group, Ensemble Galilei, former National Public Radio host Neal Conan and war correspondent Anne Garrels. In an interview with Compass, Norfolk resident, journalist and author Anne Garrels, explains how it all came to be. 

Garrels was a war correspondent for most of her 40-year broadcasting career. First, as a television correspondent in Moscow and Central America and then for nearly 25 years at NPR she covered conflicts in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, and the West Bank. In 2003 the already seasoned correspondent began her eight-year coverage of Iraq for NPR. In 2003, Garrels was one of 16 Western reporters who stayed and covered the Iraq war live from Baghdad — she stayed for eight more years. During the 2004 attack on Fallujah, she was an embedded reporter with the U.S. Marines, she covered the Iraqi national elections in 2005 and continued to report from Baghdad until her retirement in 2011. Garrels is the recipient of numerous awards: the George Polk Award for her work in Iraq, the 2004 Edward R. Murrow Award, the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the Los Angeles Press Club’s Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. In spite of the accolades, when asked if she misses it, she says ruefully, “Not at all, I stayed too long at the war.”  

After suffering and surviving cancer, her book “Putin Country, A Journey Into The Real Russia”  was released in March of 2016. Then, in the middle of that success, in April 2016, Garrels lost her husband, the political cartoonist and artist Vint Lawrence, to a sudden attack of acute leukemia. Last year her former colleague Neal Conan approached her about touring with the Ensemble Galilei, (a Celtic music group that mixes traditional music with chamber music.) When he read her some poems written by Carolyn Surrick of the group, she said “yes.” She says the poems “took me somewhere I hadn’t been.” Garrels was moved  by Surrick’s rapport with the wounded soldiers. She says, “Carolyn lost two friends in Afghanistan in the early 2000s and decided she needed to do ‘something.’ That ‘something’ turned into performing for the wounded warriors and their families at Walter Reed Veterans Hospital in Bethesda,Md. every Friday for seven years. It was an inauspicious beginning given that she played the viola da gamba (a precursor to the cello,)  but she and other members of the ensemble who joined her were a hit.She subsequently wrote a series of postcard/poems about the experience. This text, with some additional commentary by Neal and me, has been married to stunning music.”  Though the idea could seem grim,  Garrels calls the unlikely combination of music and war memoir “searing and wry, it is uplifting without being sappy.” 

After a stint last fall touring the Western U.S. with Conan and the Ensemble, Garrels will be with the group on an East Coast tour in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Hartford, Washington D.C. and Boston from March 30 through April 6.  

“Between War and Here,” April 3, 7 p.m. The Church of Christ Congregational, 12 Litchfield Rd, Norfolk, Conn., April 4, 32 Front St, Hartford, Conn., for more information go to www.egmusic.com/calendar.