Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 17

Cultural Interactions at the
Edinburgh Festivals, c����–
����
Angela Bartie
Angela Bartie is a Senior Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh. She is the
author of The Edinburgh Festivals: Culture and Society in Post-war Britain (Edinburgh, 2013) and,
with Eleanor Bell, editor of The Writer’s Conference Revisited: Edinburgh, 1962 (Glasgow, 2012).
She has interests in a range of areas of modern social and cultural history, in both Scotland and in
Britain more widely, and has published a number of articles and chapters on the arts in the 1960s,
Glasgow youth gangs, the policing of youth in post-war Britain, historical pageants in twentieth
century Britain, and on oral history, as both theory and method. She is currently working on a
history of the Glasgow Mayfests (1983-1997) and a cultural biography of the Scottish poet, musician,
and playwright Tom McGrath.
For �� years now, the Edinburgh International Festival and Edinburgh
Festival Fringe have together formed an important site of cultural exchange,
challenge, and controversy. When they began in ����, “culture” was perceived
as hierarchical, with “high” culture as the pinnacle of cultural production.
The International Festival was seen to represent this high “culchah,” with
the Fringe in the role of the “young challenger.” � The Festival and Fringe
developed alongside each other during the first �� years, sometimes in
tension and at other times in ways that were complementary, but in ways
that influenced and helped to shape and reshape the other. By their twentyfifth
anniversaries in ����, the two festivals were evidently distinct with
each bringing, and continue to bring something interesting and unique to
Edinburgh.
The inaugural Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama
(EIFMD), as it was then called, took place in the late summer of ����. The
Souvenir Programme expressed its commitment to presenting the “highest
and purest ideals of art in its many and varied forms” (EIFMD ����); but, this
�
“Culchah”, writes Raymond Williams, was a mime word that came out of the association
between culture and class distinction in the reaction to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and
Anarchy (Williams ����:��).
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