Young piper, Bradley Parker, is among six musicians to win through to the finals of the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician Award 2021.
Bradley is from Portavogie in County Down, Northern Ireland and was until recently a member of Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band with whom he won the World Pipe Band Championships three times.
Bradley won the ‘Young Musician of the Year’ award in Northern Ireland in 2011. He is currently studying for a BMus (Traditional Music – Piping) Degree at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
The BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician Award exists to encourage young musicians to maximise their musical potential by the pursuit of a career in traditional music. Each year the winner is provided with high profile performance opportunities and the necessary tools and advice they require to launch a career in traditional music.
The final is held each January at a concert at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival. The competition is organised and run by Hands Up For Trad for BBC Radio Scotland.
Meanwhile, Fred Morrison and Gary West will be inducted into the Scots Trad Music Hall of Fame at this year’s MG ALBA Scots Trad Music Awards. Both will be inducted for their Services to Performance.
This year’s awards have been pre-recorded and are being edited into two programmes for BBC ALBA. The first episode featueres the Hall of Fame and goes out at 9.00pm (GMT) this Friday (December 11). The second episode is the main award ceremony and it airs at 9.00pm (GMT) the following evening.
Fred Morrison is a well known virtuoso piper and composer whose concerts are popular and who has made a few highly influential recordings. Competitively, he won the Gold Medal at the Argyllshire Gathering in 1986, and at the Northern Meeting in 1991. Gary West is the presenter and producer of BBC Radio Scotland’s ‘Pipeline’ programme. Over the years, he has recorded and toured with various folk bands. He competed in recent years with the Greater Glasgow Police Pipe Band. Gary is the President of the Lowland & Border Pipers’ Society and works as a Professor of Scottish Ethnology at the University of Edinburgh.
Gary and Fred join, among others, TNPC’s former Principal of Piping Roddy MacLeod MBE, John D. Burgess, Donald MacPherson, Pipe Major Donald MacLeod, Gordon and Ian Duncan, Murray Henderson, John Wilson and Iain MacFadyen who have all been inducted in recent years.
We congratulate them both.
