Overcoming Barriers by Michael Craft Johnson
Physical disability hasn't prevented Benita Gold-Slater from sharing her musical gifts
"Benita, Benita, Benita," Wynton Marsalis said. "I will always remember that name." The trumpet superstar had just performed a 1990 concert at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., with the highly gifted young saxophonist Benita Gold (now known as Benita Gold-Slater). Since then, other musical luminaries have joined the ranks of her admirers, including Itzhak Perlman, with whom she has regularly corresponded.
More than their shared passion for music, however, she and the world-renowned violinist have something else in common. Both have honed their art in spite of daunting physical disabilities. Perlman was stricken with polio when he was four. Gold-Slater was ten when she contracted a rare genetic spinal-cord disease, familial paraplegia, which has left her confined to a wheelchair.
That didn't stop her, though, from earning a full scholarship to the prestigious Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where she graduated with a degree in music education in 1991. As Gold-Slater explains, "When you become disabled, you learn there are physical barriers in life. But when you become a musician, physical barriers disappear, and you are limited only by yourself. It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like or what your physical limitations may be. All that matters is: Can you play that horn?"
She could indeed play that horn. While attending the Peabody, Gold-Slater won the Yale Gordon Concerto Competition, the conservatory's highest honor. She also won the Panasonic Young Soloist Award.
Since her Peabody days, Gold-Slater has performed internationally in Belgium and Scotland, as well as at New York's Lincoln Center and Washington's Kennedy Center. She has played for Presidents Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton, and one of her most memorable events was playing for the emperor and empress of Japan when they visited Washington in 1994. And she still found time, in 1995, to win the crown of Miss Wheelchair Maryland.
In 1998 she married Arnold Slater, who is also disabled, on the eighth anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. They reside with their two children in Germantown, Maryland, where he is a para-educator for the Montgomery County schools. He also plays bass and serves as Gold-Slater's manager.
Right now, Gold-Slater is busy producing a CD that will showcase her talents as both a classical and a jazz artist, and she's included several of her own compositions among the pieces recorded for the disc. "I am very fortunate," she says, "to be working with Anthony Wellington, who is bass support and stage manager for the Victor Wooten band. Anthony has written and will produce a song for my CD, adding his bass talents to the track."
First and foremost, however, Benita Gold-Slater is a teacher.
She was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1967, and moved with her family to Maryland when she was two years old. She evidenced prodigious musical talents at an early age, and took on her first students by the time she was twelve. The Peabody degree made her calling official, and she taught full-time in the Frederick County, Maryland, public schools from 1994 through 1998, where her courses included instrumental music, chorus, theater arts and fine arts. Then she moved to the Montgomery County schools, where she taught an additional three years before opting to start a family.
Working from both her home studio and the local Music & Arts Center, she now gives private instruction to some 30 to 40 students weekly. They range in age from four to 52 years and in proficiency from beginner to professional, studying woodwind, brass, piano, guitar and percussion. "I feel blessed to have the ability to teach and perform," Gold-Slater says. "Teaching gives me the opportunity to open children's minds. Learning music lets them explore abilities they didn't know they had, which can open a future with limitless possibilities."
But even a promising student, she has found, can be hampered by a poor instrument. "An important thing about being a good teacher is knowing the right equipment to use," Gold-Slater says. "Trying to learn on a low-quality, poorly made instrument really hurts a student's ability to thrive." Her instrument of choice is a Selmer (Paris) Super Action 80 alto, which she bought with hard-earned lesson money just before entering the Peabody. It's still with her, in both her professional career and her daily life. She says of it, "That sax has taken me everywhere."
Reflecting on her many experiences, Gold-Slater says, "I thank my teachers, and now it's my turn to help others learn what music can teach." It should come as no surprise, then, that her five-year-old daughter, Eva, is studying guitar, or that her three-year-old, Mia, has just taken up piano.
Michael Craft Johnson, managing editor of Keynotes, is an 18-year veteran of the marketing departments of Conn-Selmer and Leblanc.
