| CÈILIDH CULTUREArts Officer, City of Edinburgh CouncilFor five years I worked as an arts officer at the City of Edinburgh Council. Recently the job title changed from “Traditional Arts Development Officer” to “Arts Officer (Music & Traditional Arts)” to reflect the post being made full-time at the Council following the end of the original 3-year joint Scottish Arts Council funding for the post. I elected to go job share in Autumn 2004 to reflect my increasing other work and in spring 2005 my job-share colleague was appointed in the shape of yet another folkie (!) Dave Francis. I was responsible for co-ordinating theCèilidh Culture festival. There were some amazing concerts over the years, and the Scandinavian “Northern Streams” weekend was a real highlight for me, especially in 2005 with the amazing Swedish band Ranarim bringing the house down. All that said, it’s clear things need to take a step up and the campaign has to develop a greater coherence and a bigger central ‘heart’ to allow people to engage with it more easily. As such we introduced a festival club for 2006 and 2007 which was great fun. After over five years in the post, I resigned at the end of June 2007, to concentrate more on music, and to take a post with the Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches archiving project. < BACK | |||||||||||||
