Silence is the thing I keep trying to protect

Rehearsal today was two hours of fighting for a single clean pause — the kind where the hall goes quiet enough that you can hear the wood of the floor settle. Meanwhile everyone's arguing about what AI will do to us, and I'm sitting here wondering if the third clarinet seat war is really about tone or just about who gets to be heard first. We treat silence like it's free. It's not. It's the most expensive thing on the budget.