Allie Cade
Allie Cade is an assistant curator at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, and an accomplished musician whose interest in historic soundscapes fueled her recent Thompson Fellowship research at Edgewater. “I’m guided by the materials and spaces surrounding me, and what those things and places say about the context of everyday life,” says Cade, “and what people heard, to me, is such an important dimension—-not just as a musician, but as someone who wants to make history enriching for others.”
As a Thompson Fellow, how has the Jenrette Foundation aided your work?
The Jenrette Foundation has been really integral in my development as an early career scholar and graduate student and now a museum professional and giving me opportunities to develop different facets of my career and my scholarship. I mean, from the really granular experience of being in a historic house and working through a collection that is about to be digitized to a plan for the collection—house museums are laboratory spaces. When someone like me can create a project around that evidence, you can make it your own and have some ownership over what you've learned and the material.
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 really 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 of these Thompson Fellows have taken in what I have spoken to them about, and I've seen it, I think, really make an impact on how they look at things differently. They’re hearing and not just seeing now.
How did this interest in sound, music, and historic spaces begin for you?
I always was really interested in history, and it 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, you're really just looking at the typical composers and the typical Western music trajectory, which doesn't really include anything about American music. So that was something that always kind of sat in the back of my brain as a missing piece—bringing me back to Colonial Williamsburg, where I later found an internship in the musical instrument chamber group, which performs early American music on period instruments in costume.
Performing music in that way—how did that experience lead you to your work on soundscapes?
I felt like that 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 realized how I wanted to engage with the past—through actual objects and the environments in which this historical music was played and sounds were heard in 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. 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 actually what 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 real machinery in electronics, just having that deeply profound silence at points in day and night would, I think, be quite staggering to people.
I think that it's always difficult interpreting historic sound because there are no recordings from the time period. There's a very limited amount of sounds that are like the exact sounds that one would have heard in the late-18th century, say. The limited examples being like a tall case clock and an organ perhaps keyboard instruments. From the perspective of a musician, I think that when you are using a historical instrument and you are playing 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.