When Music Sounds was commissioned by Tring Choral Society in 2020 and grew from various suggestions by members of the choir: in the midst of the national pandemic, with the prospect of making ensemble music a remote one, they hoped to engage with music through the commission and were involved in the conception and development of the work. Their ideas naturally revolved around their feelings about singing and the enforced silence they were enduring. The resulting work traces a journey from silence to music, setting words by Shelley, Blake and Walter De La Mare as well as a few fragments of text written by the choir themselves. There are three movements, the first setting words by Shelley personifying silence as one of three brethren, along with death and sleep; the second is a gentle Elegy setting Shelley’s famous poem ‘Music, when soft voices die,’ musing on the connection between music and memory, its power to invoke things that have physically passed away; finally, a single trumpet ushers in the children’s choir, building towards a final statement on the power of music with the words of Walter de la Mare (from which this work takes its title).