I thought would be a great day to get work done at the lab, because nobody is ever at the lab on weekends. But it turned out, sadly, that today was an exception.
Just when I was getting somewhere with my programming, somebody who had also come in on the weekend decided to eat his lunch to the accompaniment of loud music. Unfortunately, it was not music that I like, but you can’t really argue with somebody about their musical tastes.
So after a few minutes, I started playing Schoenberg’s piano music — in particular, Drei Klavierstücke. Schoenberg’s piano music is pretty much the only music I can play while working, because its soothingly jagged rhythms and atonal chromatic shifts don’t pull me away from whatever I am focusing on.
So that guy had his musical zone and I had mine, and for a while we co-existed peaceably. And at some point I realized that I was engaging in an act of defensive music listening.