In the autumn of 1945, the Scotsman newspaper reported excitedly on an ambitious project to establish Edinburgh as a world centre for music and drama. It would host the first great postwar international art assembly in Europe, with a mission to celebrate the “flowering of the human spirit”. Two years later, the Edinburgh international festival was born.
Seven decades on, that flowering might sometimes appear overabundant. Scotland alone has 18 book festivals this year, while the Association of Festival Organisers, which is currently updating a survey from 2022, estimates that, despite a ripple of post-Covid closures, there will as many as 900 music jamborees across the UK. Faced with the double whammy of shrinking incomes and vanishing subsidies, prices have risen and audiences have aged, while organisers face an annual scramble to fill gaping holes in their budgets that yawn wider the more brave and imaginative they are. Meanwhile, the search for alternative sources of funding, either from business or from overseas, has been repeatedly complicated by ethical issues.
