“The Sound of Love After Loss: The Squeak, the Selmer, and the Zoé”
Updated: 3 days ago
My beloved clarinet stopped working about a year after I left my old teaching job—a particularly difficult time in my life.
The Selmer Signet outlasted my father, mother, sister, and the job I'd had for 25 years but finally it developed some sort of fatal and incurable air leak in the keys in 2023. This leak caused me to squeak when I went to use the B key on the left side. I took it to a music store for repairs, and they did a total overhaul with new pads which cost me 200 dollars but didn’t fix the problem. The squeak was still there, waiting to ambush me on that B key whenever I played the higher notes softly or quickly—something that happened often in the first clarinet parts I was playing at the time in the local community band.
I began to dread playing in a way I never had before. For the longest time, I could not even figure out what was going on. I thought it was me. Maybe I wasn’t practicing enough? It was really only a few months ago that another woodwind player guessed at the air leak and I knew he was right. In 2023, I just knew it was a battle to play.
There were other troubles in the band at the time. The old director was retiring and the search to find a new one was causing me to remember a lot of the drama at my old job. I decided to leave the band like I had left the old job, not knowing if I’d ever go back. I told the church music director I could no longer play for services either. My instrument was just too unreliable and I couldn’t justify spending the family’s money on a new one. Clarinets, if you don’t know this, aren’t cheap. Anything that felt worthy of replacing my old one would be at least a thousand dollars.
This was hard. It was hard because I love playing together with others so much. It was hard because it meant leaving friends who had kept me anchored after losing the work connections I’d had at my old job. And it was hard because my clarinet is a connection to my loved ones who have passed. (Okay. My sister never really enjoyed hearing me play when I was learning but who can blame her? Even that memory of her dislike was a connection.)
But I had this one band friend who never gave up on me. You know the type. Katie the Bass Clarinet Player kept texting every so often to ask if I wanted to come back.
She’d invite me to the concerts. She pulled me into a clarinet choir to play at an assisted living facility at Christmas time. She told me when the band got a new director and that they had moved their practices to my church 10 minutes away from my house. She even sent me YouTube videos of the first concert with the new director this year.
After listening to those videos and especially the introductions to the pieces, I was struck by Katie’s words at the beginning of the “The Kind and I.”
“Every Tuesday night people from different walks of life sit down next to each other to make something none of us could have made on our own,” she said. I liked that. Something about it felt like an antidote to so much division that I see in our world, and an antidote to art created by machines. It felt like the very best kind of art where we make something imperfect and wonderful together. Most of all it sounded like an antidote to the achingly empty space in my life that opened up after I left the band.
So I dusted off my broken clarinet and decided I would try playing the third part to avoid the high and squeaky notes. I even asked Katie if she knew an especially skilled repair technician—which of course she did. I found Chris at a different music store location and he was able to make the Selmer remarkably better for only $50. I stepped back into the band with a small delight that was much larger than I had expected.
Still. I sat next to the other clarinet players with some envy of their more responsive instruments. Many of them had Buffets, a high-end instrument made in France by a manufacturer who has been making astounding instruments since the early 1800s. I remembered that Stan, the sometimes grumpy clarinet guy, had offered to let me play his Buffet once and I’d refused, not wanting to try something I could never have.
Around then, I began to let myself dream. I asked Katie if she could help me find a new-to-me clarinet. We decided to go back to the music store and try out their selection of clarinets to see what I would even like. The salesperson took us back to a practice room and I began to play, trying one expensive instrument after the other without looking at price tags. I learned about restrictive and open styles and many other things I had never bothered with before in my decades as an amateur musician.
That’s when I found the Buffet Zoé. Katie looked it up and we read that it was a limited-edition Buffet made in 2019. The Zoé was created in memory of Jean-Louis Buffet’s wife Zoé Crampon. If you want to read more about the history of the Buffet Crampon story, you can take a look at their history and fascinating images on their webpage. They started crafting clarinets and other instruments in Paris in the early 1800s.
The Zoé is made of unstained African blackwood, with the bore design similar to the top-of-the-line E13 Buffet and the key structure of the more mid-line E11. I loved the warm, full, and resonant sound I could make with this instrument. I loved that there was no battle to avoid the squeak on the left B key. And I loved the backstory with a Z in the name along with the fact that it was named after a woman. I liked that very much.
It was hard to be in love and walk away that day but I did. The Zoé cost $2500. I despaired a little just like I had been afraid I would if I dared to let myself try something besides the Selmer.
I went back to band practice with my Selmer and worked around the squeak once more. I talked to my neighboring clarinet player who had recently bought a Buffet and asked her some questions. She told me she’d decided to make payments at the music store in order to get the clarinet she’d longed for.
I’m not one for payments but I considered it.
Then Katie found a Zoé on Reverb, a sort of eBay for instruments. This used clarinet wasn’t in my original budget but it was many hundreds less than the music store Zoé. And the seller lived in Colorado, a place I’ve been attached to ever since my older son moved there.
My heart leapt and I began to look at my budget again. I talked it over with my husband who was a little baffled but supportive as he so often is. I made arrangements to make payments to the family accounts from the savings I usually keep for creative projects—interest free, of course.
And then I paid the Colorado Zoé owner the asking price. After that I waited anxious days for the new instrument to arrive until finally she did. It truly felt like waiting on Christmas Day when I was a kid.
Afterwards, it surprised me to discover how hard it was to set aside the Selmer. After a while, I figured out that my emotional attachment to my older and more broken clarinet involved my parents who had stretched their own budget to buy it for me. That was the instrument I had played with them in the house of my childhood, the one they heard at so many concerts, and the one I played at the church for my dad when I picked it back up again after a long time of not playing.
“Sounds like you got it going again just as good as before,” he said to me quietly after the service.
In moving on from the Selmer, I’ve taken a few moments to think about what can still keep me connected to my loved ones. When I played at the church on the Zoé this past summer, I could feel my parents’ presence there even though it was a different instrument than the one they bought for me. And recently I asked my grown son to buy me the sheet music for “Rhapsody in Blue," a piece composed by Gershwin that my parents had always half-jokingly said they wanted me to play. It was a soft delight to discover that the opening glissando, or run of notes, feels within my reach. I just may have to work a bit harder to get the “smear” that is standard with its warbling jazz sound but that is also a fun thing to practice.
Here it is in a newer recording with a wonderfully flashy piano player and a talented clarinet player. I may or may not ever manage the smear but it sure is a wonderful connection to my parents and my childhood every time I try.
In the end, I concluded that sometimes we have to let go of things that connect us to our loved ones or at least let them rest in the corner of our closets. The Selmer and the Zoé reminded me once more that we can stay connected and also live into our present lives with the loved ones around us now.
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