By Roddy MacLeod MBE
Welcome to Bagpipe.News! This is The National Piping Centre’s new information service for the world of piping. We hope that this service will be engaging, entertaining, educational and supportive. Our aspiration is to connect with individuals, bands, innovators, organisers, educators and all those who work towards the promotion of the music and study of the Highland Bagpipe.
The National Piping Centre’s website (www.thepipingcentre.co.uk) provides an extensive range of information which is primarily about the services we provide and the opportunities we provide for learning. Here at Bagpipe.News we will provide a daily service with News, Features, Reviews, Hints and Tips and resource material drawn from the massive archive at our disposal from both Piping Today, Piping Times and our library.
We are hitting the ground running, having already populated the site with a large store of resources already so that from Day 1 you will be able spend hours enjoying fascinating articles.
We want your news to be our news. We want to be your ‘go to’ place to publicise your information, news and events. Our Events calendar should also be your events calendar with each entry creating a separate page on the site to provide the detail you wish to put out there.
For us, this will strengthen and widen our connections to the piping community. We are a National organisation with global reach and we exist purely for the purpose of promoting pipe music and so this new website absolutely gives us all tangible connectivity.
This blog section will not be one person’s blog. Our approach will be to have many bloggers providing balanced and informative blogs on a range of topics. They certainly should be engaging and thought provoking but ultimately should reflect a balanced and considered viewpoint. Undoubtedly, we may have bloggers who represent different standpoints on issues – debate is a healthy thing – but our policy will be to ensure that any debate remains dignified and that more than one side of a debate can be allowed to be heard. In these circumstances our role will not be to judge but to inform and to let our readers arrive at their own conclusions.
We hope you enjoy reading Bagpipe.News every day and that our service provides you with the feeling that you are part of something greater. In a world where keeping things going and developing audiences for our music can be challenging, the sum of all our parts will undoubtedly make us stronger and ready to face that challenge together.
• Roddy MacLeod MBE is Principal of The National Piping Centre.
