Bau’s Blaug
The latest news from “the Big Cheese” – Executive Director Bau Graves.
Working on a Building
On August 5, Old Town School of Folk Music breaks ground on its new facility in Lincoln Square. Five years in planning, the new building is emblematic of the maturity and vitality of our institution.
For the first time in the School’s history, we will occupy a facility designed for use as a school of music and dance. We’ll have dance rooms with sprung wood floors and showers. We’ll have acoustically-engineered classrooms, so you won’t have to strain to hear your mandolin over the djembe or conga or Irish step dance class upstairs. We’ll have a dance hall with room to move when Cajun bands and salsa ensembles take the stage. And we’ll have room for lots more students, new classes, and new friends.
For the little folk school that started out in a living room, this is the biggest of deals. It says a lot that this project has attracted the funding and financing to move forward, even as the country continues to struggle through a long recession. The cost of this facility – $18 million – is in itself a measure of the School’s institutional maturity and capacity. The campaign to raise the necessary funds has moved rapidly in 2010, and we will continue to ask for the participation of the entire extended Old Town School community to drive it to completion.
But the glory of this new building is not about dollars raised or the details of the brick façade. It is about what goes on in our classrooms and on our stage day after day, week after week. The building matters, and Old Town School matters, because of the experience it provides to a thousand people every week. It matters because this is a place where our culture gets transmitted, face-to-face, keeping a light burning brightly. Now more than ever.
Filed under: Uncategorized by Bau | June 1, 2010 | Comments (2)
