History and Heritage

The Folly Theater is such a charming, wonderful place. It was built in the first part of the last century and in those early decades hosted the best entertainers and shows on the circuit. Later it saw some really raunchy X-rated days in the middle of the century when classy places had left that part of downtown, and the pictures of it then look like it was really sad for what people had let it become. When people in the 60s or 70s wanted to put it out of its misery, I’m so glad somebody had the chuzpah to put down their foot and say, “No, I won’t let you destroy this place of history and quality!” I’m glad that at some point people of culture came to their senses and realized that destroying the old to bring in the new wasn’t all of the equasion for a healthy society. That we stand on the shoulders of the ones before us. That newness is shallow and incomplete without the the foundation of the old. That you can’t develop a better future without knowing and understanding the past.

Jordi Savall’s concert on the music of Don Quixote last weekend was breathtaking! I love that there are scholar-musicians in our time that have the knowledge, interest, and skill to reconstruct the music, instruments, and techniques of their ancestors, bringing back to life (as closely as one can without recordings of the actual music) the experience of musicians and listeners from centuries ago. Last Friday we heard Renaissance Spanish music played by period instruments and interspersed with narrative from the 17th century text of the novel by Cervantes. This was a “bringing back to life” moment of people long-dead, but whose culture and society lives on in the people who played for us.

Next week we’ll experience Croatian musicians presenting the music and scholarship of their ancestors in medieval Croatian music and texts. In February, the spell-binding storytelling of the Old English text, Beowulf, will come to Kansas City. And although this all comes to us through the centuries from lands afar and people very long since dead, those heritages of culture and the sense of who those people were directly affect the mixing pot that is our country today and the direct connectedness that is our world today.