Dislocated Concerto
“equal” by Allen Morris
I lie in bed for one more second. The thought of solfege and dictation in my 8 A.M. Aural Training class makes me want to pull the covers over my head and cry. Five weeks into sophomore year, I am failing Music Theory and on the cusp of failing Aural Training. All the progress I made at the Montecito Chamber Music Festival, playing some of the most challenging clarinet repertoire over the summer, seems useless. My mind cannot bridge the gap between performing and music theory. I stare up at the white ceiling of my Chicago apartment, trying to decide if the pressed-tin design is repeating circles or diamonds.
I yawn. My body is loose as I release my breath, my mouth extending as far as it can at the top of the yawn-phrase. Except my jaw does not close. I try to shut my mouth, but only the small muscles in my lips move. I sit up. My jaw is heavy, stuck open, and now my ligaments are stretched like rubber bands to their limit. I jump out of bed towards the mirror over my dresser. My face looks like a white and black scream mask from Halloween. I try to move my jaw up and down. Nothing. It does not budge. This is no big deal. There is an easy solution.
I grab my laptop from my desk and Google, jaw stuck open. I watch a BBC video on YouTube titled “Help Me! I Can’t shut My Mouth! – Bizarre ER.” A British college student, Holly, yawns in class dislocating her jaw. The hokey narrator uses every bad jaw joke possible—“jangling jaw,” “floppy chops” “laughing gear”—recounting the events. At the ER, the doctor uses “the latest cutting edge technology,”: a stack of twenty-four tongue depressors wedged in Holly’s mouth. She winces in pain as the doctor adds another wooden stick to the stack wrapped in beige medical tape. The goal is to fatigue the jaw muscles to release tension and maneuver the jaw back into place. The camera pans to Holly’s face as she dead-eyes the wall in front of her. A sinking feeling develops in my chest. It takes five hours.
Oh, shit.
***
Six sets of legs appear under the grey hospital curtain outside my room. I shift on the gurney to untuck my crossed legs. Drool pours from my mouth, making my friend, Alexandra, chuckle. I inch to the side of the bed and quickly wipe my chin with the decorative dishtowel that has an illustration of a clarinet player at the bottom. This is ridiculous, the TLC version of the hokey BBC video.
The curtain rips back. The on-call dentist introduces himself, two orthopedic interns, two nurses, and an orthopedic surgeon. The ensemble huddles around the gurney, like an acapella group on one microphone. The dentist studies my face from ear to ear.
“Well, you don't need an X-ray. I can tell that both sides of your jaw are dislocated."
Okay, I attempt to say. Talking with your jaw dislocated is like talking when the dental hygienist cleans your teeth. You try to respond to her question about your weekend plans with her instruments still in your mouth. Your response sounds like a kazoo when it should sound like a sophisticated flute. The hygienist inevitably removes her tools, you tell her you’re going to a concert with friends. This process repeats, thus delaying the whole dreadful process. Silence is often the most powerful part of the song.
The dentist lists his cues. First, my medical ensemble will administer muscle relaxers and then massage the sides of my face to try to coax the muscles to release and allow my jaw to slide back to its normal place.
“She’s a musician. Please be careful,” says Alexandra from the chair in the corner.
“We will,” says the nurse with two French braids.
Alexandra leans to the edge of her chair, “She is a clarinetist. This could affect her career.”
I am thankful for Alexandra. Anything involving the face or arms is a source of concern for a clarinetist. The smallest thing like a cold sore can set you back a whole week of practicing. We have both heard dental surgery horror stories. Dry sockets that take weeks to heal. Lip numbness. A nicked nerve paralyzing face muscles, thus permanently ending a career. It took three extra weeks of healing after I got my wisdom teeth out to comfortably play.
A nurse starts an IV in the crook of my right arm. Pain is a strange thing when adrenaline pulses through your body. My heart rate is allegro. After the medication settles, the male medical student takes the right side of my face and the female medical student takes the left. They cannot be more than three years older than me. Each massages the muscles directly under the top of my cheekbones. The massaging is more like pawing. The dentist returns to my room. I begin to groan.
"Okay, this isn’t working,” the dentist waves his left hand for to the interns to stop. “We have to try something more aggressive.”
A blonde nurse pushes more muscle relaxers. All the white coats file out of the room. I try to relax.
A few moments later, my nurse with the braids visits with a friend. They stand at the door peering in.
“I’ve never seen a dislocated jaw before. That is so crazy,” says the male nurse from the threshold. He takes a step closer and giraffes his head closer to mine. His eyebrows rise. I lean back on the gurney, unsure if I should be proud or embarrassed.
The nurses pull the curtain shut. I look at Alexandra and shrug my shoulders. I am not going to try to talk anymore. I wipe more drool off my face. I try to laugh.
“Oh my God, Maddie, you’re the sideshow of the ER," says Alexandra, laughing.
My body feels mushy. Muscle relaxers are a particular high, everything is crystal clear in your mind’s eye, and your awareness is rooted in the present, but the world around you distills to adagio.
The dentist brings his quartet of white coats eager to watch. He cues a nurse for gauze and wraps his blue-gloved thumbs to protect himself from my molars. He places a thumb on each side of my bottom teeth. He counts. On three, he pushes down on my molars. The left side returns to the socket. He pushes harder on the right side with a scooping motion.
“Ugh. That was so crazy,” I say, stretching out “crazy” with a fermata on the “zy.”
The whole room gawks. My voice has normal timber and enunciation immediately. I am chatty from pain killers. The dentist advises I take a few days off from practicing and stick with soft foods for three days. No need for any follow-up.
***
Your chin pulls down flat, and your bottom lip smooths. The corners of your mouth close in and up like a drawstring bag around the tip of the mouthpiece. Your top front teeth anchor on the small black rubber cushion. Your tongue forms a boat shape to direct the stream of air rushing from your lungs. Your tongue rests at the opening between the reed and the plastic face, letting air flow or stop to create articulation. You inhale through the corners of your mouth, like a slow breath before going underwater. Air fills your lungs to the base of your diaphragm and then into the clarinet in one deliberate line. Muscles down your jawline stretch. Nothing is clenching or tight. Your body is secure and delicate so that the sound can be completely natural.
You play an open G. No fingers cover the holes. This is the pure straight tone of the middle register. Your reed is round and clear — no buzzing or fuzziness. Slowly, you place down your left thumb, F. Then your pointer finger, E. Then you speed up to eighth notes and cascade through D and C down to B. You trill between B and C until the repetition is just right. Now the rest of your right-hand presses down, adding more notes. Now you loop up and down the instrument, engaging all your fingers in the warm low octave. These are the notes that made you fall in love.
This is the ritual we do when we first pick up our instrument to play. The first sounds we make are like signatures, distinctly individual, and almost always the same noodle every time we start to practice. I did not notice my musical marking until Alexandra mimicked the phrase back to me on her clarinet. Alexandra also has a signature—slow-to-fast articulated open G’s to test her reeds, which seems to match the intensity of her personality. It is funny how the music mirrors the person. Even the instrument choice says something about the player.
It did not take long for me to become obsessed with playing the clarinet. The more I learned, the more I loved, and the more I loved, the better I got. The beginning years were slow, placing last chair in youth wind ensembles, always in the third row of clarinetists, buried in the band, hidden from the audience. I envied the clarinetists playing Clarinet Part 1 my conductors constantly praised. I wanted to be the principal clarinetist. I took lessons seriously and slowly improved.
In high school, I played in at least three, sometimes five, music ensembles at a time. The more I played, the more I wanted to play. Every six or eight weeks, we learned a new concert worth of music and performed. I loved seeing the boys in their concert tuxedoes and dressing in all black. I spent Friday nights at the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra buying students tickets and whole summers at music camp. My other interests—writing and drawing—naturally came second. I quit my high school golf team so I could prepare for college auditions.
As a senior, I placed first chair. I sat at the conductor’s left, in the line of musicians at the front of the stage and I played principal clarinet in orchestras. Permanent definition took hold. Clarinet was more than an interest or hobby. Thousands of dollars were spent on equipment and lessons. I put in hours upon hours to get into music school. I practiced during study hall and my lunch hour and after school and on the weekends. There were auditions after auditions after auditions.
By the time I was a freshman at DePaul University, being a musician was my identity. My talent was earned, not natural. Music ruled my body and my interests. I introduced myself by saying, I am Maddie and I play the clarinet, as if both of those statements were the same thing.
***
The moment when my facial muscles engage and air leaves my body to play my clarinet, it feels like there are marbles stuck behind my jaw, creating intense pressure. The muscles in the back of my mouth and down my neck ache sharply. Playing is strange and flat, no longer second nature. Over weeks, that sensation in my mouth lessens, but trauma to my jaw ricochets down my body. The muscles in my neck and upper back overcompensate and knots burrow deep into my shoulders. Even breathing causes pinching and piercing stabs in my back. The base of my skull feels pulled by strings, ready to snap. I can not sit for more than ten minutes without the symptoms crescendoing. My practicing is unproductive and distracted because I am in constant pain.
The director of the DePaul Wind Symphony insists I drop the course for the rest of the quarter at the end of October. I want the music school to make an exception for me, to let me sit in the rehearsal with a score, so I can stay on track to graduate in four years. You have to be playing to be in the class. Maybe you should take some time off. I don’t want to contribute to more injury.
The discs between my temporal and jaw bones are permanently damaged from dislocating my jaw. When I go home at Thanksgiving for winter break, I am diagnosed with TMD or TMJ, temporomandibular disorder. Presumably, playing the clarinet created extreme flexibly in my jaw muscles and ligaments, so lying on my back made it easy for my jaw to dislocate when I yawned.
I begin intense physical therapy twice a week for my jaw, neck, and back pain. Physical therapists use their pinky fingers to press down on the tender tissue in the back of my mouth, the muscles most damaged from the dislocation. Tears well in the corners of my eyes. The latex medical gloves taste like sweet rubber. Their hands cup the base of my skull to manipulate my neck left and right, up and down, to release tension. The physical therapists use their elbows to dig out the knots in my back and place bright blue medical tape in an X on my skin, pulling my shoulder blades together to fix my posture and hopefully release strain. When it is time to return to Chicago in the New Year, my pain only gets worse.
This is not the first time the clarinet caused me physical pain. My wrists begin to bother me shortly after I get a new clarinet my freshman year in high school after I outgrow the limited quality of rental clarinets. If I was serious about music, I needed a serious instrument. A Selmer Signature. The dark black granadilla wood was heavier than the wood of other brands, but the density and darkness drew me to this particular clarinet. The tone I create is warm and rich. But after hours of playing, my wrists are tired and sore. I begin to rest the bottom of my instrument, the bell, on the top of my knees. A habit of weakness. A habit teachers will try to get me to break. My family nickname this new malady, clari-nitis. I do not know if it was actually arthritis or carpal tunnel syndrome because it never got bad enough for a doctor’s diagnosis. I buy braces for my wrists to sleep in when the pain bothers me. I take Ibuprofen if it gets bad. Pain is part of the repertoire.
Playing an instrument alters your body; the practice of invisible gradually becomes visible. Calluses form inside my mouth from the pressure of the mouthpiece. My right thumb blisters from the thumb rest. The reed on my mouthpiece tattoos two parallel white lines on my lower lip. Other reed players, bassoonists and oboists, build the same barriers on the inside of their lips from their teeth. Brass players get a red half-circle on their upper lip, imprinted by their mouthpiece, some more chapped than others. My violin friends have impressive welts on their necks, "violin hickeys," from the chin rest. Depending on their skin pH, some flute players get "flute beard," resulting from gray residue on their chin from the metal of the instrument. Finger pads for violinists, violists, cellists, and bassists become thick and strong from strings on fingerboards. Some classical guitarists grow out their nails to function as picks. Your body grows around your instrument: how to breathe effectively; how to use our bodies as extensions of the instruments we hold in our hands.
We train every muscle to perfection. The ones in your lips and your jaw, your tongue and your soft palate, your throat and your lungs. Your diaphragm. Even your hips and legs and balls of your feet, whether you stand or sit when you play. Every muscle, joint, and vertebra. When I dislocated my jaw, I had been working my body for ten years—molding it into embouchure and hand position; into tone and sound; into eighth notes, sixteenth notes, etudes, orchestral excerpts, and solos; into a voice, that could not be recreated, after that morning.
***
I relied on the title of “classical musician.” I reveled in the rare oddity of the profession. Most people do not know what a clarinet is, confusing it with the soprano saxophone and Kenny G. or the oboe. When people asked me why I studied music, I always said, I’m seeing where it takes me for now. Failure always lingers behind the pursuit of creativity. Music was never official in my mind because the statical chance of a successful career in music is low. My future was planned and confined as a musician. For a while, those constraints were comforting. They simplified the concept of the career; win an orchestra job, teach private lessons, teach at a university, play in a chamber music ensemble. But all of those opportunities are one-in-a-million. Talent and luck. Will I be good enough? Will my clarinet bag get pushed to the back of the closet? The odds were clear from the beginning. Winning a spot in an orchestra or tenure at a university seemed improbable.
Todd’s warning replayed in my head. If there are other things you could do for a career, pursue them. Todd—the principal clarinetist of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and my private teacher when I am was senior in high school—played the clarinet because he had to. He did not have anything else.
As much as the clarinet created joy it also turned into a burden of responsibility and discipline. The clarinet was my major, my intended career. To stay at a professional level, you have to play every day, racking up four or five hours of practicing to maintain your chops and learn all of the material musicians have to know. I felt guilty for not wanting to practice. Then I felt guilty that I did not want to spend my career working every weekend, Friday and Saturday night shows, and matinees on Sunday. I felt guilty that I wanted to be able to take a vacation. To leave my clarinets at home and not carry them on a plane as my checked bag. I did not want to make a temporary music stand out of a suitcase in a hotel room or miss walks on the beach, museum tours, to stay back and log those necessary hours to not lose strength in my embrasure. Even two days off from playing renders the first practice back challenging. I felt guilty for wanting more spontaneity. I feel guilty for feeling guilty.
The clarinet was supposed to be my time of refuge. If I am honest with myself, it stopped being that sacred place long before I dislocated my jaw.
***
Winter semester, I take Intro to Creative Writing. My professor makes our class journal for ten minutes every day. I spend most of those ten minutes writing trying to figure out what I want. I want the pain to go away. I want a different jaw. I want a different music school experience. I want to feel supported by my teachers, leave every lesson inspired and motivated, not like their goal is to weed me out. I want to get A’s in music theory and be comfortable transposing and analyzing chord patterns. I want a consistent practice routine like waking up at 6.A.M. to log two hours of practice before the day begins. I want to graduate on time with my friends. I want to play music and be good at it. I want to have other interests. I want to be a musician without guilt. I want someone to tell me what to do.
I avoid my clarinets. I keep them hidden behind my bedroom door, in the corner of my room. I focus on my other courses. I become obsessed with cooking, roasting chickens and panfrying pork chops, to eat up time. Each week my clarinet lessons get worse. My professor is frustrated with me for my lack of progress. She knows I’m not practicing, but I don’t know how to manage my physical pain to practice. It seemed like my only choice was to take a break from playing for at least a month, which meant dropping my clarinet lessons and putting me two semesters behind in graduating.
I lie when physical therapists ask me why I am dropping my music major. They do not want me to quit because of the pain. They are convinced my TMJ will get better. They can fix it. But I know that is naive. TMJ is not curable. If I choose music, I will live with pain or the fear of pain for the rest of my career. Once pain became a permanent part of my playing, all of the joy slipped away. Now, every aspect of music was hard.
There are two choices for injured musicians; stay in music without playing an instrument: conducting, composing, programming, sound recording, music theory, musicology, and artist management, or leave music entirely and pursue something else like most high school band geeks. I hated music theory, and frankly, I was too jealous and resentful of other musicians whose bodies had not rejected their instruments as mine had. The idea of watching my colleagues and peers excel at their instruments while I had failed was far too embarrassing. I did not have the drive to make my body work. The more I lay with this decision, staring at the ceiling tracing intercepting lines of circles and diamonds, the more inevitable and gradual the decision to leave music becomes.
There is a sixteen-note phrase I cannot play in Debussy’s Première Rhapsody. After fifteen minutes of coaching from my professor, I am still not playing the phrase correctly.
“I think we should end early,” says my professor. I nod my head. I wasn’t sure if this would be my last lesson. If I’d have the nerve to break the news, but in this moment, I do. I tell her I need to drop lessons. I need a break from playing to try to let my body heal.
“You can always take lessons again in the Spring.”
I pack my clarinet as fast as possible; I don’t swab out the spit or take the reed off the mouthpiece. I need to get outside. Two blocks away, I sit on the low metal garden fence in front of Lincoln Park brownstone. I call my mom and sob. I’m not going to take lessons again in the spring. I am done studying classical music. I am devastated and relieved and unsure of who I am.
When I let go of music, I understand the beauty of uncertainty and possibility. It did not matter if I choose a circle or diamond on my ceiling. The two made one cohesive pattern.
***
Now, my clarinets are tucked safely in the squishy black interior of their cases at my parents' house in Wisconsin. I do not play much anymore, but I will never sell my instruments. I need to honor the musician who said, I’m seeing where music takes me, and hope that one day I’ll get back to them.
I lost all of my muscle strength in my embouchure and reading music is not as easy as it used to be. My jaw continues to pop and crack from TMJ, but I am mostly free of pain. Almost a year and a half from the first time I dislocated my jaw, I did it again. Those details are hazy from one too many margaritas that night. Another disastrous yawn, this time while I put on loose cotton pajamas. Finally, I see a specialist and he tells me the bones of my jaw are shaped perfectly for dislocation. He points at the shallow curve on my temporal bone that lets my condyle, the ball part of my mandible, slip past the joint. My anatomy and my passions created the perfect melody for disaster.
Memories from playing emerge from little things—old photos, black dress pants, classical music playing in the background of coffee shops. Mind lapses of the past come to the present. When you reach a certain level of playing and stop, your instrument becomes a phantom limb. A life once lived.
I find myself in a movie theater singing the melody of the soundtrack in the end scenes, two pianos playing over the actors in their final movements on the screen. I know this piece, I know this piece. It was the last movement from the Mother Goose Suite by Maurice Ravel. I played the principal clarinet part in the orchestra adaption when I was a senior in high school with a youth chamber orchestra.
Maurice Ravel originally composed the suite as a piano duet for two children he adored. It is a story of fairy tales: Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb, Empress of the Pagodas, Beauty and the Beast, and the Fairy Garden. Ravel wrote heartbreakingly beautiful lines full of playfulness and warmth, designed to evoke the poetry of childhood. Listening to the Suite sends me back to sitting on a riser with other woodwinds in rehearsal.
My conductor raises his arms. The room is airy and big for this size of a chamber orchestra, only forty teenagers instead an orchestra of one-hundred musicians. We take a collective breath, and the melody of the last movement begins with Prince Charming entering the Fairy Garden accompanied by Love, awakening the Princess as day breaks.
Earlier in rehearsal, we rehearse my favorite movement — the story of Beauty and the Beast. The beginning clarinet solo lies easy under my fingers, quiet at first, then expressive and glowing. I am Belle, enchanting the Beast, the growling contrabassoon, with a waltzing melody.
The final movement is serious but bright, what love would be in a world of only childlike awe. As the violin sings its solo over flutes and clarinet, my eyes are glassy. I follow the black notes on the page, watching my conductor for the downbeat. The orchestra continues to grow in grandeur, music swirling around and through my body. The chimes and brass celebrate over the forte of strings and winds.
About the Author
Madeline Jones is an NYC-based writer originally from Milwaukee. Jones graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Jones’s essay, “Frisson,” was the runner-up in the Boulevard Magazine 2022 Nonfiction Contest. Her writing appears in Breadcrumbs Magazine and is forthcoming in Third Coast Magazine, and Post Road Magazine. Jones is working on a collection of essays exploring her relationship to music, art, and the body.
About the Artist
Allen Morris is a photo-process artist and educator based in Spearfish, South Dakota. He is an Assistant Professor at Black Hills State University where he teaches courses focusing on analog photographic processes, alternative and historic photographic techniques, and interdisciplinary practices.