January 2024 Maker-Creator Visit
The Winterthur Suite
Alexandra Cade, violist and historian
Tommy Dougherty, composer and violinist
Employing comprehensive methodology to unpack craftsmanship, aesthetics, history, and use, objects can be understood in a multitude of ways. Their materiality speaks to deeper understandings of their human entanglements, which informs our present. However, these perceptions are often limited to what one can see and feel. Turning to the sounds surrounding an object, music can bring historical themes to the forefront and place them in immediate conversation with the object’s physical appearance. As a team comprised of a historian and composer, we are particularly interested in how the understanding of an object can be expanded through sound. In what ways can music inform about the human experience, and especially highlight the stories of marginalized communities, commoditization, and violence that are so often underneath the elegant exteriors of American decorative arts? This project, The Winterthur Suite, aims to fuse interpretations of the past and present to enrich the physical experience of objects and spaces, creating a new composition that can simultaneously stand alone and work in conversation to encounter familiar objects in unfamiliar ways – Alexandra Cade
Tommy Dougherty 