Allie Cade

As a Thompson Fellow, how has the Jenrette Foundation aided your work?

The Jenrette Foundation has been integral in my development in several ways—first supporting me as an early career scholar and graduate student, and now continuing to give me opportunities to give back as a museum professional. All throughout, I’ve developed different facets of my career and my scholarship. I mean, a site like Edgewater acts as a laboratory space, and the chance to spend time there really gave me the granular experience of working with a historic house at a moment of transition, where plans for the collections and direction of interpretation are still in early stages. When I was able to create a project around all the evidence in this natal space, I was really able to make it my own and have some ownership over the material and future of the space.

How have you shared your Edgewater soundscapes research?

I think I am evangelical in the way I am so passionate about bringing house museums or any historic space to life—and the merit of that—and the Jenrette Foundation gave me that opportunity during my Thompson Fellowship to create a full soundscape for Edgewater. Every year I go back there, I have new ideas of what I want to add to it, and it’s something that’s a living project—a living document—and sound, again, is so ephemeral and it can always change. Having that as a guide or a tenet of how I approach history in general and really given the opportunity to apply that to a space was one of the most important things that Jenrette has given me. 

Being able to come back as someone leading a workshop on that project has been a real treat and I look forward to it every time I have the opportunity to do it because every single year there's a different class of Thompson Fellows. So you're meeting four new people each time with exciting, diverse backgrounds and that always forms the workshop, and kind of guides the workshop. Every year, I learn something new from doing it, especially just being on the other side—being an educator, presenting my theoretical work and materials to a new audience. It's always a learning experience for me, but I also have witnessed the ways that all these Thompson Fellows have absorbed what we’ve talked about, and I've seen it, I think, really make an impact on how they engage with objects and landscapes a bit differently. They start to look at a space not just to see, but to hear.

How did this interest in sound, music, and historic spaces begin for you?

I always was really interested in history, and that interest grew parallel with my musical career. The start, for me, was when I first went to Colonial Williamsburg—in the seventh grade, as it happened, and I think a lot of people have a similar tale where they experience that sort of living history environment for the first time and become enthralled by it. It was always my sort of dream to work there, although I didn't really know what context because I was so deeply involved in music. The way that music is taught in the pre-college level matters to this story, because in it, we’re often only exposed to the typical European art music trajectory, which doesn't offer anything about the complex and vast contributions of American music history. So that was something that always kind of sat in the back of my brain as a missing piece—what was American music? And what did playing music look like for people in 18th and 19th century America? This brings me back to Colonial Williamsburg, where I was able to start answering those questions by performing with their early music chamber group, which interprets the musical life of colonial Virginia, allowing me to play early American music on period instruments, in costume, in historic interiors.

Performing music in that way—how did that experience lead you to your work on soundscapes?

I felt like it was a perfect fit for me. That was the first time I worked in a museum context, and it was when I was really performing in those historic spaces in Colonial Williamsburg in costume with historic instruments that I really realized how I wanted to engage with the past—through actual objects and the environments in which this historical music was played, bringing to life the sounds of early America.

What would be surprising to us if we were able to access the sounds of the late-18th and early-19th century?

I think that there would be some very alarming sounds, and that could include the sound of people being sold at the market, and rampant use of firearms. Of course, in an urban area, you will have a lot of animal sounds, which you might have only thought of as a rural sort of sound. You are going to have different transportation sounds, of course, related to horses and cobblestones, for instance. But I think what actually might be the most surprising is the silence. There would be a level of silence that we, in the 21st century, can't even fathom. In an age before any sort of large-scale machinery or electronics, just having that deeply profound silence at points in day and night would, I think, be quite staggering to people. 

One of the great difficulties in interpreting historic soundscapes is due to a lack of recorded sound from the time period—but that’s the exciting challenge. There's a very limited amount of sounds that are the exact sounds that one would have heard in the late-18th century, say. The limited examples being something like a tall case clock or musical automata, as early examples of mechanical sound. But from the perspective of a musician, we are sometimes able to use historical instruments and when you are using them to play a piece from the period, you're getting as close as you can to sort of breaching that veil between the past and the present. So, there's this power to it.