So today's forays into interactivity come from a long tradition. Yet these interactive inventions may someday put composers out of business, at least those who cling to the quaint idea that composing means one person in private putting notes and sounds together for later public performance. But people who will tell you about pieces they hate to love, but love anyway, are somewhat more rare. Saying you've got a thing for Brahms' Hungarian Dances Nos. Theatre critic Benedict Nightingale reflects on 35 years of attending the Edinburgh Festival.
Unpredictability is the essence of Edinburgh.
And here let's agree that the distinction between Festival and Fringe is often slim. In 1991, Pauline Kael decided to stop writing movie reviews for The New Yorker, which she had been doing more or less continuously since 1968. Nine years later, everyone still wonders what the most influential movie critic of all time thinks. Across the world, it plays, as several historians have noted, the role that Latin played for Europeans in the Middle Ages. It's the international language of vital work.