If history made a sound, it would be a musical one. It's easy to imagine the crash of cymbals and rumble from a pedestal timpani drum as musical elements of wars.
There is also perhaps no better shoo-in for the disco era of the 1970s than the "chica-wah-wah" of a strummed electric guitar.
But how might you connect music to America's history of bondage, brutality and beastly treatment of African slaves? What if you could take a person from that era and paint them with music that is symbolic of their legacy?
Classical music composer Nkeiru Okoye answers those questions with an operatic tribute to the woman history often calls Moses in Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom (Songs of Harriet Tubman).
"It's teaching you about Harriet Tubman. It teaches you about the Underground Railroad," she says. "It's a weighty piece. As I'm writing it, I'm aware of the weight of that, and sometimes that's intimidating."
The 35-year-old from Millville, N.Y., takes her painstaking, historical research of Tubman and translates it into musical intimacy. She even refers to Tubman as "Harriet" as if she knows the woman who during the mid-1800s freed herself and then helped other slaves to freedom.
"She's not quite a dear friend. I don't sit down and talk with her. ... In some ways, she is ... a muse. She's no longer Harriet Tubman. She really is Harriet," Okoye says.
Yet, even after all the work and live performances, including one at Coppin State University last year, Okoye says the Tubman piece, which includes four arias, is a challenging work she tweaks and performs.
"I'm writing, not just about Tubman, but about music that happened at that time," she says. "There are a lot of people who have done pieces on Harriet Tubman and they do a whole bunch of spirituals; to me it's just like cheating.
"We all know that we as African-Americans know about gospel and we know about jazz," she says, "but that's not the music they were doing at that time."
As a result, this two-hour musical presentation examines the slave culture on a 19th-century American plantation.
In "My Name is Araminta," Okoye describes the life of Araminta "Minty" Ross, Tubman's slave name before she married freeman John Tubman and took the name Harriet. It includes her early years as a slave in Bucktown in Dorchester County. There is also the chronicling of an injury that nearly killed her.
