(upbeat music) - The Salt Lake Symphony is presenting its final concert, an exploration of sound and silence, where audience members will be invited to join in guided meditation throughout the evening.

And here with all the details is Robert Baldwin and Phillip Bimstein.

Welcome, gentlemen.

This concert, I can't tell you, I'm very excited about it.

It sounds incredible.

- So are we.

- Yeah, so tell us what's on the performance schedule.

- Well, I mean, in many ways it's gonna be like a concert that you have never seen before because it's music.

We think of music as sound, but this also will have a silence element and it'll invite the audience to kind of experience the music in a different way.

So everything from composers you've heard, like Sibelius and Handel all the way to composers maybe you haven't heard of as much, John Cage and Henryk Górecki.

Melissa Heath will be a soprano soloist, and Phillip Bimstein is our composer for the evening and will also be the concert host and will help the audience with some guided meditations as well, if they so choose.

- I love it.

Okay, and Phillip, I adore your work, by the way.

- Well, thank you.

- Yeah, so talk about "Silence."

- Yeah.

I'm honored that Rob has chosen this piece.

"Silence" is part of a larger work that I composed based on "Refuge," the book by Terry Tempest Williams.

And to compose the piece, I recorded Terry reading aloud selected phrases from her book.

And then I wrote music that supports, is built upon, and flows out of both the meaning of her words and the feeling and tone of her voice.

So in the performance, you will hear her recorded voice as she speaks warmly about the role of silence in her life, as well as in all of our lives.

And for example, she says, "Silence is the strength of our interior life.

If we will fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope."

- Wonderful, wonderful.

I can't wait for this concert.

I'm so glad you're doing it and that you're both here.

Thank you.

- Thank you very much.

- And if you'd like to know more about that upcoming concert of the Salt Lake Symphony, "Sound and Silence," it's May 17th at 7:30 in Libby Gardner Concert Hall on the university campus.

Go to saltlakesymphony.org.

That's saltlakesymphony.org.

I'm Mary Dickson.

Thanks for watching "Contact."

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