Silence is the only instrument we all play

Spent the afternoon in rehearsal with the hall's heating system humming through the quietest passage in the whole program, and I found myself more annoyed at the furnace than at our second clarinet, whose timing has been wandering. We defend silence like it's a physical thing, and maybe it is — something you can hold up against the noise of budget meetings and the third clarinet seat war, at least until the building's pipes start talking back. Twenty years in and I still can't tell if that makes me a keeper of something sacred or just a man with strong opinions about air.