The Chipped Tooth That Nearly Ended My Playing

A embouchure is a fragile thing

Most people think a brass player plays with their lungs. We do not, not really. We play with a tiny, ridiculous, deeply personal arrangement of lips, teeth and muscle called the embouchure, and it takes years to build and about a second to ruin. I have played the trumpet since I was eleven. I am fifty-two now. For most of those years I have earned my living teaching it, in a rented studio in Sandton with terrible parking and a piano that is always slightly flat, and I have never once taken my front teeth for granted, because my front teeth are where the sound begins.

You build your whole technique around the exact landscape of your own mouth. The way your top lip sits against your two front teeth is as unique as a fingerprint, and every player learns the precise geography of their own. I could find my playing position in the pitch dark, half asleep. It was the one thing in my life that never changed. My marriage changed, my address changed, my hairline changed. The way I set the mouthpiece against my teeth did not.

And then, on an ordinary Thursday, in a car park, I chipped it.

The stupidest possible way

It was not heroic. I was loading my trumpet case into the boot of my car and my phone rang, and I turned to grab it off the roof, and I misjudged the height of the boot lid and stood straight up into it, and my top lip smacked my front teeth, and I heard a small tick, and I felt with my tongue a new sharp corner on my right front tooth that had never been there before.

I want to be honest about the size of the panic. To anyone else it was a tiny chip, cosmetic, the kind of thing you might not even notice on a stranger. To me it was as if a violinist had cracked the neck of their instrument. I got in the car and I put the mouthpiece to my lips right there in the car park, and the sound came out fuzzy and wrong, air leaking where it never had, my top lip finding a new edge that it did not know and did not like. My whole physical relationship with thirty years of music had been altered by a car boot.

I had a concert in nine days. A proper one, with a small ensemble I play with for the love of it, and a solo passage I had been looking forward to for months. I sat in the car and did the sums a self-employed musician does, which is not about pride but about rent, and I felt sick.

Finding someone who understood the problem

Here is the thing nobody tells you. When you are a brass player with a damaged tooth, you do not just need a dentist. You need a dentist who understands that the shape and surface of that tooth is not cosmetic to you, it is functional, it is your instrument. A rebuild that looks perfect but sits a fraction of a millimetre proud of where the old edge was could change my playing for the worse forever.

I did not have a regular dentist, which is embarrassing to admit at fifty-two, but I had spent my adult life avoiding anyone going near those teeth. So I asked around. Another musician, a horn player who had been through something similar, told me who she used. I ended up sitting in the waiting room of a Cosmetic Dentist not far from my studio, clutching my trumpet case like a nervous child, because I had decided that whoever fixed this was going to have to let me play-test it before I left the chair.

I explained all of this to the dentist, probably too fast, expecting to be humoured. Instead the person actually listened, asked me to bring the mouthpiece to the next appointment, and talked to me about matching the exact contour of the original edge rather than just making it look nice. That was the whole difference. Being taken seriously about a thing that sounds trivial and is not.

The play-test in the chair

The repair itself was quicker and calmer than the days of dread that led up to it. What I remember is the moment afterwards. I put the mouthpiece to my lips, sitting up in the dental chair with the bib still on, feeling absurd, and I played a quiet middle register phrase, the one I always use to test my setup, the opening of a piece my first teacher gave me forty years ago.

It was right. My top lip found the edge and the edge was where it was supposed to be. The air did not leak. The note bloomed the way it should. I played it again, and then a third time, softly, and I felt my eyes go hot, because I had genuinely made peace in the preceding week with the idea that my playing might be diminished for good, and here it was, whole, given back to me by someone who had understood that a tooth can be an instrument.

I have since become almost evangelical, in a quiet way, about people going to see a good Dentist in Sandton before something breaks rather than after, the way I always avoided it. I tell my students, half of whom are teenagers who think they are immortal, that their teeth are part of their instrument and they should treat them that way.

What the chip taught me

I played the concert. The solo passage went fine, better than fine, and nobody in that audience knew that nine days earlier I had stood up into a car boot and thought my playing life might be over. That is the strange privacy of a thing like this. The crisis was enormous and completely invisible.

What stayed with me was not the fear, though, it was the relief of being understood. For most of my life I had carried this odd, unshareable anxiety about my front teeth, the sense that the thing my whole livelihood balanced on was fragile and that no one else could possibly grasp why it mattered. And then a Sandton dentist put a mouthpiece test into the middle of a dental appointment as if it were the most reasonable request in the world, and I did not feel like a strange, over-attached musician. I felt like a person whose work was respected.

I still flinch a little when I load the trumpet into the boot. I check the height of the lid now, every time, like a small superstition. And when a young player tells me they have knocked a tooth and are terrified about their embouchure, I do not tell them not to worry. I tell them that I know exactly how much it matters, and that there are people who will treat it as seriously as they do, and I watch the fear leave their shoulders the way it once left mine, in a chair, with a bib on, playing forty-year-old notes back into being.