I read with interest Joseph Vella Bondin’s letter deploring the absence of Maltese music and composers in the Malta Arts Festival (January 15). I am a visitor to Malta from Northern Ireland where Derry-Londonderry has just completed its term as UK City of Culture 2013, a year-long celebration of the arts in which I was involved as both participant and as a member of the audience.

In the course of Derry’s year as UK City of Culture there was nothing to compare – in programming and quality of performers – with the two and a half weeks of Valletta’s International Baroque Festival in 2013 and 2014. With the exception of one-off visits by the London Symphony Orchestra (playing film music) and the Royal Ballet (performing ballet excerpts), Derry’s year of culture was essentially focused inwards on local (Irish) music, literature, plays and artists.

The gains of this approach in promoting grass roots participation in the arts by local people should not be underestimated. The debit side was that there was little to attract widespread interest from outside the city, and even less from outside Ireland, in the numerous cultural events that formed the central spine of the Year of Culture. Whereas my impression is that the Valletta festival is already, in only its second year, attracting visitors from all over Europe, drawn by the truly international character of its performances.

This should not be seen as a ‘colonial pattern’ or, in Bondin’s words, Malta being “ignored and humiliated by its own flesh and blood” but as an affirmation that music – like doctors – should be sans frontières. And if it means that it gives a boost to the local economy, so much the better.