Glastonbury festival
| Glastonbury Festival | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Status | Active |
| Genre | Music festival |
| Frequency | Annually (last weekend of June) |
| Location(s) | Pilton, Somerset, England |
| Coordinates | 51°09′18″N 2°35′10″W / 51.155°N 2.586°WCoordinates: 51°09′18″N 2°35′10″W / 51.155°N 2.586°W |
| Years active | 46 |
| Inaugurated | 19 September 1970 |
| Founder | Michael Eavis |
| Most recent | 22 June 2016 – 26 June 2016 |
| Next event | 21 June 2017 – 25 June 2017 |
| Participants | See lineups |
| Attendance | 135,000 (2016) For full attendance, see here |
| Organised by | Glastonbury Festivals Ltd. |
| Website | |
| glastonburyfestivals |
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Glastonbury Festival is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts that takes place near Pilton, Somerset.
In addition to contemporary music, the festival hosts dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, and other arts. Leading pop and rock artists have headlined, alongside thousands of others appearing on smaller stages and performance areas. Films and albums recorded at Glastonbury have been released, and the festival receives extensive television and newspaper coverage. Glastonbury is the largest greenfield festival in the world, and is now attended by around 175,000 people, requiring extensive infrastructure in terms of security, transport, water, and electricity supply. The majority of staff are volunteers, helping the festival to raise millions of pounds for good causes.
Regarded as a major event in British culture, the festival is inspired by the ethos of the hippie, counterculture, and free festival movements. It retains vestiges of these traditions, such as the Green Fields area, which includes sections known as the Green Futures and Healing Fields. After the 1970s, the festival took place almost every year and grew in size, with the number of attendees sometimes being swollen by gatecrashers. Michael Eavis hosted the first festival, then called Pilton Festival, after seeing an open-air Led Zeppelin concert at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music.
Glastonbury Festival was held intermittently from 1970 until 1981; since then, it has been held every year, except for "fallow years" taken mostly at five year intervals, intended to give the land, local population, and organisers a break.
A series of concerts, lectures and recitals called the Glastonbury Festivals was established with a summer school in the town of Glastonbury between 1914 and 1926 by classical composer Rutland Boughton (1878–1960), and with their location attracted a bohemian audience by the standards of the time. They featured works by then-contemporary composers, sponsored by the Clark family, as well as a wide range of traditional works, from Everyman to James Shirley's Cupid and Death.
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