“Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.”

– Hildegard von Bingen

Music can help us achieve a kind of stillness that’s elusive in the modern world. Out of the silence comes inspiration, motivation, wonder, awe. We’ll hear music that’s all about quiet and silence on this week’s episode of I Scream Sunday.

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• Juta Takahashi: “Silence” (Silence)
  
  
• Lomita: “Place of Silence” (This Music Plants Trees 2)
  
  
• Phillip Wilkerson: “Unfolding Quietly” (Complex Silence 23)
  
  
• Divided by Two: “The Silence Beyond” (Electromagnetism)
  

In the second hour, the live set is called The Shores of Silence. The poetry used includes the one from Hildegard, above, and from a modern writer, Matty Kahler:

Through epochs carved in stone and ash, they rise—
Cities crowned in glory, empires kissed by fleeting skies.
Hope, the ember that outlives ruin’s bitter breath,
Guides trembling hands to build once more from death.
Lost and longing, they weave order from the void,
Dreaming peace from fractured dreams destroyed.
Yet order’s gilded mask conceals chaos in its veins,
And from each conquest, discord breaks its chains.
A few, clear-eyed, glimpse the cycle’s cruel art,
But wisdom, weightless, bears no shield nor dart.
They watch, helpless as waves crush castles of sand,
While humanity clutches dreams it cannot understand.
The struggle ends not with conquest, nor fleeting might,
But when truth’s vast shadow meets love’s quiet light—

Only then, when veils are cast aside,
Will the weary find peace where wisdom and wonder abide.

– Matty Kahler, March 2025