What Makes A Music Festival Work?

The UK is overrun with music festivals. So “why do we have music festivals, what do they achieve and where can it all go wrong – or right? Essentially, a festival, even an early-music festival, must be about the new and the fresh as well as celebrating the established. If it seeks only to reinforce preconceptions and repeat the familiar, it has failed. It is all too easy to build a programme of nothing but popular classics and, certainly in financial terms, all too tempting. But while such a festival may deliver an audience, it does nothing to extend musical horizons, or to create a buzz.”