A Conversation with Colin Williams

Colin Williams, Associate Principal Trombone of the New York Philharmonic, generously spent part of an unexpectedly free afternoon talking with me on the phone about his journey through injury and recovery. It was a heartening, inspirational conversation enhanced by the occasional addition of the very little voice (and one large burp) of his three-month-old son. 

AB: What was your injury and how did it occur? 

CW: What I was diagnosed with was a partial tear of the orbicularis oris, and about eight weeks after the initial injury, I developed a very pronounced divot in my upper lip where the injury had happened. The injury itself occurred in the middle of a concert. We were playing Pictures at an Exhibition. I remember I came in on an entrance, a very middle-register note, but kind of loud (the first note of “Catacombs”) and it felt like someone had shoved a white-hot needle up into my lip. The note I was playing double-buzzed in the most bizarre, strange way, and I remember thinking, wow, something’s wrong, because I even got tunnel vision for a second. It was very painful and very scary. But I finished the show. I realized that everything felt much more tiring than normal, and I was fighting to keep my sound together, and I would get these random shots of pain. That continued for about eight weeks. I knew something was wrong, but I’d never heard of someone having a real chop injury before in that way.

AB: So, you kept playing through it?

CW: For about eight weeks I did. That’s when this divot really became pronounced because I was continuing to abuse the injured tissue. When you stress those contused tissues out, the muscle fibers continue to recede, and that’s what caused the divot. There were some fits and starts after those two months –  trying to figure out how to make it work without pain. First, I took a couple weeks off and tried coming back. Then I took a longer period of maybe three weeks and tried to come back again, and it was pretty evident at that point that it was not going to happen. I couldn’t play without these random, really tough shots of pain and I was having trouble with endurance and keeping my sound together the way I wanted. So, I took something like nine months away from the horn.

AB: Nine months, no playing at all?

CW. Yeah, it was a long time.

AB: This is when you were in Atlanta, right?

CW: Right. I think this was in October of 2009. Then I started trying to figure out what was going on. I reached out to people. I found Cindy Lewis and Laurie Frink. I sent pictures of the divot to some people I trusted. No one really knew what to do or what to recommend, because no one had really seen anything like it. I started seeing Dr. Simon McGrail up in Toronto while I was off the instrument. He had prescribed some calisthenics for the lip to try to thicken up the muscle that had survived the injury, and I was also consulting with an oral surgeon/plastic surgeon in Atlanta named Dr. Keith Jeffords. Dr. McGrail wanted to perform surgery on me. He told me after I’d taken a bunch of months off, “Well, this didn’t really heal up right. You might as well try playing again, but I don’t think it’s going to work out, so when it doesn’t, you can come back and we can talk about your surgical options here.” So, at that point…that was about as low as it got. This is also the time I decided to see one other person, Dr. Craig Vander Kolk. He was the one who gave me the most thorough diagnosis and what has proved to be the absolutely one hundred percent correct diagnosis in terms of what happened to me, what the prognosis was, and what the recovery was going to be – it was spot on. And Dr. Jeffords in Atlanta was also on the same page. I think my outcome would have been much poorer if I’d had surgery.

AB: Surgery is such an extreme thing to go through.

CW. And Dr. Vander Kolk said it the best way, I think. He said that he could perform a textbook-perfect surgical procedure and, just because of the way scar tissue works and the way the musculature works within an embouchure, he couldn’t guarantee I’d be able to come back to the level of playing I had before. So, he said that if musicians are able to do on a fundamental level what they need to do in order to play, then he generally doesn’t recommend surgery because it’s too risky. 

AB: So, can I ask you out of personal curiosity: those calisthenics from Dr. McGrail, did you feel like they helped you?

CW: I’m honestly not sure. Maybe? But I don’t know that I felt particularly strong when I came back to the instrument, even having done those exercises religiously. And I don’t feel that there was a substantial thickening of the muscle tissue that it was targeted for. I think maybe it works for some people. But I’d say, for me, it was inconclusive at best.

AB: That’s sort of my experience as well – I had been doing them for a long time and I wasn’t sure if they were helping or not.

CW: Maybe it would have been worse, but I didn’t feel it was substantially better than what it would have been had I not been doing them. So, after all that time off, I tried to work it up for about three months before coming back to the orchestra. But that whole first year back in the orchestra was really tough. Everything felt very fragile, I was worried about the chops all the time, and I would still have pain. I think one of the hardest things, when I went through that long period of time off, was when the constant, throbbing pain became a part of my daily life.

AB: So, it was there all the time? Not only when you were playing?

CW: Oh, no. It was the first thing I felt when I woke up and the last thing I felt before I fell asleep. It was just this constant, throbbing, aching pain. There were certain faces I couldn’t make. Doing things like putting my lips around a straw or on a glass, or certain syllables that were too percussive, if the consonants were too hard or required me to purse my lips – that could be painful. Faces I would make when shaving…. Random stuff I had to be very careful of. Even my speech became affected because I ended up trying to talk over to one side of my mouth so I wouldn’t stress out that one part of the lip. This stayed around in some form or another for probably about five years.

AB: So even once you were fully back into playing you still felt that pain.

CW: Yeah. I wasn’t getting the shocks of pain anymore for the most part. I mean, I would randomly get those, but they steadily declined over that long period of time. I’d say it wasn’t until my second year in New York, honestly, that I was what I would consider to be pain-free.

AB: Wow. I find that so extraordinary. I feel like I have this expectation of playing without pain. And whenever I experience any little sensation –  the tiniest thing – alarm bells go off in my head. I’ve had to work really hard to take the anxiety out of feeling those sensations, or, more often, the mere fear of those sensations, and to place my focus somewhere that is more helpful. So, was the pain right where the mouthpiece sits? 

CW: It would originate there, but the pain would radiate to the entire side of the face like a shock wave. And you know, the other thing that was really tricky was that, probably about my second year back when I was starting to feel a little more confident and I was pushing myself a bit more, I played a brass concert with the Chicago Symphony guys and I had this weird secondary injury – not on the place that had been injured before, but in another part of the embouchure that was picking up all of this slack and not used to working in that way. So, my original injury was on the top right part of the embouchure, right about where the mouthpiece contacts the lip, but I ended up having these other muscle aches that went all the way through the lower left part of the embouchure in the muscles that go down toward your chin on the lower lip (in the buccinator and depressor anguli oris). Those muscles had to work so much harder and got completely stressed out, so I had the aching pain on one side and this other random thing on the other side which felt a little more sharp, or even itchy sometimes. So, that second-to-third year was really rough. I found a way to make it sound decent within the ensemble, but with solos, auditions, and in my own practice I had a hard time. I think it got to the point where the sensation became completely married to my perception of my own sound, so sometimes it would sound decent, but I was incapable of perceiving that because of how bad it felt. Nikki [Nicole Abissi, Colin’s wife] was the one who first pointed that out to me. I think it continues to be something I fight against. I’ve always been hard on myself and on my production, just like we all are, but I think that tendency ramped up a couple notches through this experience.

AB: So, throughout this rebuilding process, how did you know that what you were doing was okay and “safe” to do if you couldn’t use pain as an indicator?

CW: I went with a few different approaches to that: that pain could be an indicator. If pain started to ramp up, become more frequent, or more sharp –  if I started experiencing more of that sharp kind of pain –  that would be an indicator that I was going in a direction that wasn’t healthy and that I needed to step back. An aching pain, and the occasional pop/zap, something like that during a show, was just something I had to make peace with, because it didn’t go anywhere. I did a couple things to try to keep myself on track. First of all, Laurie Frink taught me a way to redesign my approach to the instrument. That was pivotal for me on my road to recovery –  the way she taught me how to piece my embouchure back together. Also, the expectation was that, occasionally, it was going to give me trouble or pain, but that as long as I didn’t go crazy in terms of trying to play five, six hours a day or something like that, that the embouchure was strong enough to be resilient. I still did things like ice my chops and take Advil, but it became clear that there was going to be pain and I had to trust that it was going to continue to heal.  I would just make sure that I didn’t try to be a hero for a while, whereas before, I might try to do something to make it particularly exciting through a physical output on the instrument. I just tried to be a good ensemble player for a while, not push myself, not do anything outside the orchestra, always set the timer while I was practicing, and to try not to play too far into fatigue. Also, the actual instances of people re-injuring themselves are fairly low, so I had to trust that as long as I was being really diligent and not falling into any bad embouchure habits that I may have had before, that it was going to work out. But it was definitely a leap of faith.

AB: That is one of my biggest questions: how do you make that leap of faith and how do you regain trust in your body and how do you get over that hump where you feel like, well, maybe I could do more, but I don’t know if I’m ready…? 

CW: You just have to be continuously diligent. I kept track of what I practiced, how much I practiced. It’s also important to make sure you have a good support system around you of those who will be honest with you about what you sound like – and try to actually believe them! You know, people around me told me I sounded good and I would not hear of it. So, getting a support system around you that will give you honest feedback. And then I think sometimes you have to put yourself in a situation that will stretch you just a little bit. Not much. You don’t want to go from feeling this thing to putting on a recital. But playing an inner part in a chamber concert, or something that will have a little solo for you, or something easy to get back out there and start building up these small, successful experiences – I think that’s the only way to get out of it. Because there’s never going to be a time when you feel like you’re ready. It’s all built upon small successes and small failures that accumulate into something that is overall more positive where you at least have a better understanding of what’s going on with your body and your playing.

AB: So, if you don’t mind me getting into some nitty-gritty specifics, can you talk a little about what Laurie Frink had you do?

CW: I remember going in there, and one of the first things she had me do was play some pianissimo scales, and at a certain point, she had me playing two-octave pianissimo scales up to high B-flat, because at that point I could control that register. I didn’t want to play loud, and I didn’t want to do extended, big, broad kind of playing, but I had learned a little about how to get into the soft dynamics and create a good, compact sound. And one of the first things she said was, “listen if you can do that, you’re going to be fine, but here’s what you need to do.” She taught me that some people who have injuries end up with all kinds of secondary mechanical hiccups in their playing. For me, whenever I would take a breath, I would involuntarily snarl up the injured side of my lip, like if you smell something bad and you curl your lip toward your nose. I did that on that one side and I had no idea I was doing it. So, if you’re putting that piece of lip potentially out of place when you go to engage the instrument, that could lead you to less efficient playing for sure, but could even get you into a little bit of trouble. So, really learning how to make sure the embouchure system was set, and also figuring out how to better perceive the aperture within the mouthpiece. We did that through using a “Lips, Mouthpiece, Horn” Caruso-type exercise. I would buzz the half step on my lips, then on the mouthpiece, then on the horn. So, it wouldn’t be a whole series. It was one interval on the lips, the same on the mouthpiece, then on the horn. And always aiming toward the lower side of the pitch, and being conscientious of the clarity of the sound and the core of the buzz. I did those exercises, along with something I incorporated, which was Cindy Lewis’s “blocked buzzing.” I found that if I did lips, blocked buzz, mouthpiece, horn, that it allowed me to build up even more confidence in what I was doing. Something about the blocked buzz…this is a confidence-builder that I find interesting. When I’ve done this with my students, even those who have wacky embouchures from time to time, they almost always revert to this very balanced, well-supported structure. Without the baggage of having to create a buzz or a pitch, somehow we are much more comfortable finding the most efficient way of setting up the embouchure on the mouthpiece. So, I watched the progression from the lips to the blocked buzz, to the mouthpiece buzz, to the pitch bend on the horn, and finally just a straight long tone. I found it to be very helpful in developing this new muscle memory. I think when you have a muscle injury, your muscle memory from your previous playing life is useless. For me, there was a lot of memory attached to tissues that didn’t exist anymore. They had been broken and reabsorbed by the body, and the nerve innervation and scar tissue were causing the throbbing sensation. So, these techniques from Laurie Frink and from Cindy Lewis were how I was able to get myself back to some understanding of what I needed to do to play efficiently. 

AB: Did you make any equipment changes during this time?

CW: When I first came back, I looked around for mouthpieces that were more comfortable, because I felt like the mouthpiece I was playing before was too big and was also sitting uncomfortably on that injured area. It felt like pain that was needless. So, I ended up going to a mouthpiece with a smaller rim, more shallow cup, and a smaller throat and backbore. Also, early on, I went to a smaller bore instrument. So, instead of a normal symphonic .547” bore trombone, I had a dual bore .525”/.547” and that made things a lot easier in the short term. I actually really like the sound I got on the thing in listening back to old recordings, but it’s not something that I could use in my current situation! But I think it’s an element worth exploring. Some people have the philosophy that you shouldn’t change anything. I know that Cindy Lewis is adamant about not making those accommodations because you can get yourself even more confused at the same time as you’re trying to recalibrate the system. But it was necessary for me.

AB: Another nitty-gritty curiosity of mine: you mentioned that you used ice and Advil. Did you find those things to be helpful?

CW: I did, because I was so prone to swelling if things got at all beat up in that area. I had a lot of scar tissue in the area where the injury happened. Scar tissue, when it’s young, absorbs water really easily and gets stiff. So, if I had a thin area that was also kind of stiff intruding into an area that was supposed to be buzzing in the mouthpiece, it was very difficult to keep anything that resembled a clear or centered sound. I found that managing inflammation was very, very important for a number of years. I just got into a habit of it. So, when I was done with a practice session I’d do ten minutes of ice and be pretty aggressive with the Advil and the NSAIDs. I also used a warm compress at night. That’s the last thing I would do. I’d take a small wet towel and put it in the microwave for five seconds. As the doctors described to me, you need that extra blood flow to help the tissues heal. During the day, preventing flow was fine, but at night when the body needed to heal, I tried to make sure that there was enough blood supply going to that area.

AB: So, how did you keep yourself sane during this whole thing? Because this was a long period of time. And I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s been very easy at times to go down this rabbit hole in trying to figure it all out, and in all the confusion, it’s easy to descend into sheer panic or despair. Also, career and identity and the capacity for generating income are threatened and it’s very easy to be overwhelmed. How did you deal with all of this?

CW: Oh, well, I completely fell apart. And I think that, aside from the physical element of recovering from these kinds of injuries, the mental and emotional part of it is just as difficult, if not more difficult, I think, because you go through (especially early on) this whole grieving process – anger and bargaining and all this other stuff because of this thing that you’ve lost. And for me, I definitely had to battle real depression. I’d never had an experience like that before, but I went through a period of being depressed, and having anxiety –  like the unable to sleep, screaming anxiety. At first I tried to do things holistically. I started to lift weights – I got really strong! I had all this extra time, so I went to the gym a lot. I went back to school and got a business degree, and that was interesting in some ways, but it was also depressing. I tried to examine what life in orchestral management would be like. I tried to do other things – with the hope that I wasn’t going to be homeless, you know. I’ll never forget the feeling of waking up one night when I knew I was looking at a long period of time off, and I had fallen asleep on the couch watching TV or something like that, and I woke up and thought, wow, everything around me is paid for with trombone. The food in the fridge is trombone, the ceiling is trombone, the cat food for the cats is because of trombone. What am I supposed to do if I’m not a trombone player? So, it was that kind of anxiety that just made it impossible for me to function. In the end the only thing that really helped – the only thing that actually allowed me to be patient with the recovery – was to have some sort of professional emotional support system. For me that was therapy and getting help with the anxiety. It was really important. And I think that anybody dealing with these injuries has to make sure they are taking care of the emotional component as well, because without that emotional well-being, you’re never going to be in a place to be patient and to endure the process, because it’s too brutal, and it’s too challenging. And for us, how many times do we self-identify our entire life’s worth based on the last thing that came out of our instruments for the day? Like every day. So, when everything you do is crap in your own estimation, then you are crap. It’s a very tough cycle to break. Also, it’s important to try to understand how much of your own identity and self-worth is tied up with being able to play an instrument and being a musician. That was a big lesson for me, to try to diversify my own self-esteem in that way. But it was certainly not something I could have done alone, in the dark, at night, with-a-drink-in-my-hand kind of thing. That’s a path that a lot of people go down and they self-medicate, and I had some elements of that too. But until I was able to get an emotional, psychological support system together, the progress was not as quick as it could have been, I think.

AB: I feel like it’s this great unravelling that one has to go through on every level – unravelling everything that you are and finding a way to put it back together in a healthy way.

CW: Yes, it’s brutal. It’s a painful process. It is certainly a labor, in the Greek kind of sense – a labor of Hercules or something. It is arduous. It is a massive effort that’s required and a surprising amount of introspection and patience and the ability to self-assess, and the ability to stand up to your own self-assessment. It’s tough.

AB: And so, what was the – I don’t know. I want to call it a “tipping point” – but when did you know that you wanted to keep doing this, as opposed to doing something else?

CW: Well, first of all, I always loved it so much that I knew I wanted to see if I could get back to it, and I knew if I gave up without trying as hard as I could, that, no matter what decisions I made for the rest of my life, I would regret abandoning trying to recover my craft and my voice. So, I made a deal with myself that until I had truly exhausted every last bit of energy into this recovery, that I wouldn’t give up. Even though it was daunting and sad and difficult, I wouldn’t give up on it until I was really, truly sure I had come to the end of the road and that things were not going to improve. Or if I had another injury or something like that, then at that point I could say, alright, this is not for me. So, I guess, I never had a tipping point, but I can say that I think at a certain point I was comfortable. I thought, okay, I can be someone who can be in the Atlanta Symphony and this is all I do. I wanted to do more solo and chamber playing, but I had to be happy with an exclusively symphonic life for a while. Then after a while I said, okay, I’m going to try to take an audition. My first audition back was horrible. Absolutely terrible. Complete one hundred percent mental fold because I didn’t have the mental chops for it. But another year went by and I took another round of auditions and that’s when I was in the finals for three auditions in a row including the one that I won here in New York, so I guess I would consider that a tipping point – a pretty high tipping point – but you know at a certain point before that I had enough positive feedback to think that it was going to keep getting better. Did I know where the absolute ceiling was? No. But I felt like I had traveled far enough to know that I could be okay with continuing to improve at the pace I was improving. I wish that I had a particular moment where I could say I felt that everything was going to be okay, but I never really had that. It was so cumulative. There were so many little victories, so many little defeats, some big victories, some really rough defeats. Boy, early on I had some really tough, really brutal failures – high profile things – because I tried to come back too early, and those incidents probably got in my head for about a year. So, it was much more of a cumulative slow grind, a little bit of positive experience, and a refusal to quit as long as I was getting a little bit better. And it helped talking to a lot of doctors, knowing that I was going to have to come to terms with the pain and the fact that I was going to be uncomfortable. It was not going to be like before, at least initially, where everything was just fine. That pain just had to be something I learned to live with. But it did go away. I don’t experience it now.

AB: I think that’s one of the hardest things – that period of time where you know that it’s not going to be like it was before. It may be good again, but it’s not going to feel exactly like it did before and there will be discomfort.

CW: You know it’s interesting. I’m not sure if you’ve come across this with people you’ve spoken with, but it seems to me that for people with either injuries or surgeries, this five-year mark is really important. Most people have resolved into a happier place with considerably less pain, and they feel like they’ve recovered a lot of their ability at that five-year mark.

AB: I’m definitely hearing the recovery period talked about in terms of years. I had been thinking (in my own case) in terms of weeks and months at the beginning. But, yes, it’s been stunning to me how many people tell me what each passing year felt like. 

 You’ve shared so many wonderful things here. Is there anything I’m forgetting? Do you have any more thoughts?

CW: I think we’ve basically covered it. I think the main thing for me is for people who have these injuries that the really important thing is to remember what the timeline is like and that very often you will continue to have pain, which doesn’t mean you won’t be able to play and continue to be successful. But also, know that you need to have a really strong emotional and psychological support system to go with the physical recovery.

AB: Thank you, Colin!

If you’d like to hear Colin speak more on this subject and many others, check out this Brass Junkies podcast.