Cheltenham Music Festival
4 - 19 July 2008

...and join us in 2009 - 3 - 18 July 2009

Listen...
to the Cheltenham Music Festival podcast 2008

Christopher Cook and Meurig Bowen introduce the Festival programme, with a host of music extracts featured in this wide-ranging and international musical feast.

(With thanks to Chandos, Hyperion, ECM, Linn and Nimbus and to Lyndon Jones 07813145106 for production.)

Hear this! try our audio sampler

From the Director

I suppose it should be called Artist Spam - the unsolicited approaches festivals like us get from performers offering their wares. Some of them are spot-on, and result in the bookings they set out to get. Others - gig offers from a Palestinian hip-hop outfit, say, or some Celtic reggae from Solihull - are not for us.

A polite reply informs them of their misdirected interest. But how misdirected is it, actually, given that we describe ourselves as a 'music festival'? Sure, 30 seconds of web research would have put them off our scent. But if we don't explicitly say that we're (basically) a classical music festival, are we mis-selling ourselves to the majority of people out there - you? - for whom a 'music festival' is more readily associated with hundreds of thousands of mud-caked campers and queues for the chemical toilets?

This Festival's name, in over 60 years, has been through a few changes. For many years, it was the Cheltenham Festival of Contemporary British Music. Later it was just the Cheltenham Festival, and sometimes it's been 'international' too.

Our current name, the Cheltenham Music Festival, remains fraught with issues. For starters, what is the 'jazz' of our sibling Cheltenham Jazz Festival, if it isn't also 'music'? And how wise would it be to call ourselves the Cheltenham Classical Music Festival? The artist-spam might diminish. But in a programme like this year's, where would it leave Romanian gypsy kings Taraf de Haidouks, Northumbrian pipist Kathryn Tickell or our cabaret dinners with Tango Volcano and Fascinating Aida?

And how potentially unappealing is that word 'classical' anyway? For too many it seems to imply something that's a bit dried up, exclusive and unattainably complex - sounds dreamed up by dead people and residing in a musical museum. Yet every single note of every single concert in this Festival will, I hope, blow these notions apart - this same classical music is vibrant, welcoming, absorbing and very much alive.

But if 'classical music' is a problem term, are the alternatives any less problematic?

Some call it 'Serious Music'. Oh dear - can we possibly dare to take it, and ourselves, that seriously? Where is the joy of music in that, even if some classical music is extremely serious and beautifully miserable?

Some call it 'Art Music'. I know where they're coming from, but does that imply that any other kind of music isn't 'art'?

If people are drawn to this kind of music, as they seem to be, later on in life, should we call it 'Grown Up Music'? But what of this Festival's schools concerts or our family breakfast workshop, Cereal Samba?

If for most people a Music Festival takes place outdoors, why not call it the Cheltenham Indoor Music Festival? With the exception of all our weekend Surround Sound events, that would at least be true...

And I suppose if a Music Festival for most means, in its broadest sense, 'Popular Music', how about the Cheltenham Un-Popular Music Festival? The trouble is, quite a bit of the music featured in this 2008 Festival - Carmina Burana, The Planets, The Lark Ascending, Grieg's Piano Concerto - really is very popular music.

So I'm not getting anywhere in this re-naming game. Any ideas?!

In the meantime travel through a programme featuring over 800 years of music - from pieces written in 1198 to ones which, as I write this, haven't been started yet - and I'll look forward to seeing you here at the Cheltenham Music Festival this July.

Meurig Bowen
Director, Cheltenham Music Festival

Meurig Bowen announced as the new Director of the 2008 Music Festival

Cheltenham Festivals is delighted to announce the appointment of a new Director for its Music Festival. Cheltenham Festivals welcomes Meurig Bowen in this exciting new post for the start of the 2008 Festival season.

Meurig Bowen joins the Cheltenham Music Festival with impressive credentials in programming and festival management gained from his time as Head of Programming at Aldeburgh, and as Director of the Lichfield Festival. Meurig brings to Cheltenham a cosmopolitan enthusiasm for contemporary art music and with experience of both chamber music and symphonic repertoire, his appointment firmly continues the Festival’s tradition for the finest in classical music.