"If traditional music does not change, it's not traditional, because it needs to stay part of the life of its community." These words, spoken by longtime New Mexico musician Roberto Martínez, sum up the challenges faced by individuals, institutions, and societies seeking to keep their past relevant to their future.

The twentieth century saw an unprecedented, worldwide acceleration of social change. Often, such rapid evolution outpaced time-honored values and practices, eroding their currency. In many cases, a tsunami of unchecked global intrusion via commerce and the media provoked this change, overwhelming cultural self-determination and displacing the local with the foreign. In a time-span as short as a single generation, entire languages, musical traditions, and other expressive cultural systems were abandoned in favor of cultural trappings invented by others.

But the 43rd annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival tells another version of this story. It invites us to explore the process of cultural evolution