I’ve long been accustomed to using the word “master” in relation to music. I’ve driven myself to master certain aspects of my craft, I’ve recognized the hours required to attain mastery, I’ve encouraged my students to do the same. And, of course, I’ve ushered many a student toward a Master’s degree in the 30+ years since I received my own.
Living in North Carolina, though, brought to my attention another meaning of that word, a meaning that had no resonance in my upbringing: the master as slaveholder. When I first moved here in 1987, I thought of American slavery, when I thought of it at all, as a distant, abstract concept. My ancestors came to this country long after 1863. All of them settled in the Northeast, where I grew up. Even after years of living the South, where slavery was once a part of daily life, the idea of it only claimed my attention on far-flung occasions. I may have even thought that people who dwelled on it were living in the past.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about racism, which I was exposed to from an early age. Racism is not, in my experience, limited to particular regions. I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve been. What I hadn’t considered, until recently, was the specific heritage of slavery, and I gave it little thought.
But twelve years ago a guest composer, African-American, addressed the topic in a seminar. He said slavery was a living thing in his family: harrowing stories told by an elderly aunt at the kitchen table about the things that had happened to his great-grandparents were an indelible part of his being. His descriptions brought a truth home to me that I hadn’t fully considered before: the imprint of long-ago events and eras on individual family histories.
For years, I’ve begun my Counterpoint class by reading the opening of Johann Josef Fux’s seminal text on the subject. Fux’s quaint and florid style is both illuminating and amusing. The book is written as a dialogue between a teacher and student — Aloysius and Josephus — so I have always had two students read it out loud.
One quaint and florid detail that can be counted on to get a laugh is Josephus’ manner of addressing his teacher. “Oh revered master,” he exclaims, and the sound of one counterpoint student addressing another in that way always gets the room chuckling.
In the last couple of years, though, I started wondering how that word “master” would feel to me if I had ancestors who were slaves. It’s not a question I want to ask anyone who might know. It doesn’t seem fair to expect any one person to speak for such a large group: some might shrug it off, while others could find it truly disturbing. But the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea of getting a questionable chuckle out of something so unnecessary to the topic at hand.
So this year I typed out Fux’s three-page introduction, substituting “teacher” every time the word “master” appeared. Not sure if the time spent was necessary, but I don’t suppose I have to know in order to feel like it was an appropriate thing to do. We may not be able to solve the world’s challenges, but we can certainly take every opportunity to make incremental improvements.