“Music, at Least, Doesn’t Lie” is the title of a guest column by concert pianist Jonathan Biss that was featured in the New York Times last Sunday.

He wrote:

“The performing arts ... have much to teach us about the notion of truth. There is no great performance ... that doesn’t have truthfulness at its core. The search for truth is an artist’s life’s work.

“That work corresponds directly to the audience’s need. People have varied and mysterious reasons for [listening to music]. They may want to be uplifted, distracted, amused, discomfited or all of those things at once. But one impulse accompanies all of these contradictory desires: to be in the presence of something ineffably right.

That need grows ever stronger as ... the distortion of reality [bombards us] every day. Great art momentarily restores our sense of what is true.”

Music does not lie. It cannot lie. It cannot be made to lie. It is always what it is: simply true, simply there, simply happening “in real time.”

The other thing music cannot do is be silent. It must SOUND. If it doesn’t sound, it is not music.

Sometimes, however, a composer wants to evoke the IDEA of silence, the feeling of silence … i.e., the hushed and mystic emotions we sometimes feel emanating from silence, a rare occurrence in our noisy time.

That is what I tried to do in writing the piece I hope you will permit me to share with you today. Titled “The Farther Shore of Silence,” the text comes from Odell Shepard’s book “The Cabin Down the Glen,” which I am proud to say I discovered, edited and published back in 2006. (That is another story and shall be told another day.)

The piece is a motet for two-part women’s chorus. Most of the singing is wordless but if you listen carefully you will hear some lyrics sung as well. These are the lyrics:

“A hushed night. The stars listen, and the hemlocks, all the ferns of the glen, all listen. They listen to the deep everlasting song that comes from the farther shore of silence.”

How then, to evoke what I have called “the feeling of silence”? In this piece, I tried to do it by scoring much of the piece for WORD-less chorus. Silence, after all, is wordless. So are the singers throughout most of this piece.

“The Farther Shore of Silence,” sung by the women of the Harvard University Choir under the direction of Carson Cooman, was recorded when they sang the piece as part of a worship service in Appleton Memorial Church on the Harvard campus. The piece has been performed only that one time; almost no one has heard it before today. To hear the recording, click on the link above.

The score from which the choristers are singing is an early version of he piece, which I later revised. Because of that, if you follow the score offered in the PDF above, you will notice some discrepancies.

I'd love to know what you think about this music; feel free to reply if you're inclined. But please don't feel that you are expected to reply. I'm just glad to share my work with people who are interested.

As always, you may forward this message to friends who might enjoy it.

Anyone can be on the list of recipients for these mpFrees (as I call these music emails). To sign up, people can email me at rick@sowash.com, sending just one word: "Yes."

I'll know what it means.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
Mar. 9, 2026
www.sowash.com