The piping world has been paying tributes to one of its legends, Bill Livingstone, who died on February 22, 2025. Bill’s friends, including many pipers and bands who knew Bill and been influenced by his music, have written messages on social media to pay tribute to the massive impact he had on pipe band music and in the solo piping world.
Bagpipe.news has the privilege of carrying a handful of articles written by Bill from 2019 – 2020 for the Piping Today magazine, which was published by the National Piping Centre, and a few are included at the foot of this page.
It was a real honour for Piping Today to have a world-wide respected piper of such stature contribute to the magazine, sharing his opinions and knowledge of the music.
While we were all in lockdown in 2020, Bill offered a wonderful 2020 Vision piece on the future of pipe music, ‘from an old curmudgeon’. The piece was limited to 200 words, but Bill’s passion for the music shone through and revealed how grateful he was for the life it gave him. Thanks for everything Bill!
In 2005 Bill was interviewed by Mike Paterson for Piping Today, and spoke about his reasons for recording the four CD series A Piobaireachd Diary, and spoke about his leadership of 78th Fraser Highlanders Pipe Band at that time.
Bill Livingstone: A Piobaireachd Diary
Spreading the inspiration around
By MIKE PATERSON
BACK in 1969, Pipe Major Bill Boyle (1930-1981) made a lively, entrancing recording of light music with Gordon Ogilvie who played the pipe organ in the chapel of St Andrew’s College, Christchurch, New Zealand. A copy of that recording made its way to Ontario, Canada, and to the home a young Bill Livingstone.
“It was a stunning piece of work,“ Bill recalls. “I remember listening to that as a young guy and thinking it was just wonderful.”
And two Pibroch volumes were made on the Waverley label by two of the day’s great piobaireachd exponents, John Burgess and John MacLellan. “My father, who was a good light music piper, had those albums of some of the classic piobaireachd repertoire: the Lament for the Viscount of Dundee, The Battle of the Pass of Crieff, the Old Men of the Shells… I listened and listened and listened to those things.
“I was blown away by the music, the tonality and the beauty of it, and it drove me to get at the thing in a big way.”
Now, having won both gold medals in Scotland and the Piobaireachd Society gold medal in Canada — along with a glittering array of other top-level professional solo piping awards, Bill Livingstone has released his four-album A Piobaireachd Diary set of recordings: “I believe recordings can have a profound influence,” he said… “inspire people, and give people a love for the thing. That’s what happened to me.”
It is his hope that the albums will help to fire younger generations — and older pipers who may have side-stepped piobaireachd — with a passion for this music.
The first two CDs are studio recordings; the last two feature performances at the Dan Reid Memorial invitational competition in San Francisco. (And more are under consideration.)
On all four, Bill Livingstone provides spoken background to the tunes — personal anecdotes, introductions and takes on the music, and an explanation of influences that have shaped his particular approach to each of the tunes: MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart, In Praise of Morag, Lament for the Earl of Antrim, Lament for the Children, The Battle of the Pass of Crieff, Lament for Patrick Og MacCrimmon, Lament for the Viscount of Dundee, Lachlan MacNeill Campbell of Kintarbert’s Fancy, Lament for the Harp Tree, The Daughter’s Lament, Lament for the Only Son, The Laird of Annapool’s Lament and The Old Men of the Shells.
“I don’t want to say that I’m not looking for accomplished piobaireachd players to listen to this … I hope they do,” he said. “But, for the audience I’m targeting, I believe the tunes need contexts, a little extra effort on my part, to help them be understood.
“It’s like so much classical music; if classical music is thought of as a music that follows a well-defined form, that attracts critical attention and that calls for an educated listener, then piobaireachd qualifies. It’s not a folk art: it’s a highly developed artificial form of music. The first time you listen to a sonata, you might not really get off on it, but the seventh or tenth time, when you’re familiar with the melodic line and the feel of the piece and can anticipate what’s coming along, your enjoyment has really increased because you have an understanding of what’s going on.
“There are so many pipers who don’t understand and love piobaireachd, and it’s a crime because, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the music that the bagpipe was developed to play. Everything else has come along since… piobaireachd is ‘it’. It’s such wonderful music that I want people to share in it and to learn to love it.”
His interpretations of the 13 tunes he has included on the albums are played in prize-winning competition style, true to the way he received them from his teachers: John MacFadyen, John A. MacLellan, John Wilson, Donald MacLeod, Andrew MacNeill… “I couldn’t have asked for a better mix and range of teachers,” he said.
At the same time, Bill Livingstone said he finds little to argue with in the work of scholar Allan MacDonald, which points to much freer styles of playing piobaireachd in the past, and to an intimate historical relationship between piobaireachd and other Gaelic performance arts, not least importantly with song.
“I admire Allan MacDonald’s work,” said Bill Livingstone, “and I accept his basic argument: those influences on the performance and composition of piobaireachd seem inevitable. And I have no quarrel with Allan when he plays Glengarry’s Gathering the way he does. In fact, if I was to play that tune now, I’d find it irresistible — I would have to play it as Allan has presented it. It’s wonderful, I love it.
“But I also believe that, if piobaireachd’s become an ‘art music’, there’s nothing wrong with that; I don’t see anything ’wrong’ with any kind of music metamorphosing over time into something new, more disciplined or refined. I just don’t see that as a conflict,” he said.
“Roots are roots… and the highly developed form of piobaireachd we now have has evolved from those roots and become something a bit different.”
Similarly, Bill Livingstone is unperturbed by Dr William Donaldson’s thesis that notational development came to inaccurately represent and then change performance style — “I’m just not sure it’s an argument that gets us very far,” he said.
“If you hear somebody play The Lament for the Children well today, for example, almost every good piper plays the tune within the same basic shape — and how beautiful that piece of music is. How much does it matter that its root might be Macintosh’s Lament? How much does that sort of concern matter when piobaireachd was handed down from lip to ear, singing the material, and all of the nuances and lights and shades passed from one pupil to the next? Because of the nature of the teaching of the thing, I’m not sure that the musical score is necessarily an important thing.
“In earlier times, pipers generally had one instructor and adhered faithfully to what they were told by that instructor. As long as you could trace what you did back to a good, sound root or foundation, you had some degree of comfort that you were getting the product relatively unblemished.
“This is why the genealogy of piping is so important. I think my own playing owes a lot to John MacFadyen’s teaching and style. His playing was very, very strong… he was an extremely vigorous player: he took a tune and shook it and that was a great influence on me and my playing.”
Piobaireachd, now, is a musical from which Bill Livingstone sees as having reached something of an artistic zenith. “I think it’s a wonderful art form the way it is and I’m not sure that there’s much more to do about further developing it.
“People are composing tunes, of course — I’ve composed one myself that I think is fine. People are getting better and better at playing it, and the instruments bear no comparison with what we had to contend with when I started competing seriously. But, beyond that, I don’t see much room for ‘development’.
“Nevertheless, you can play the ‘art music’, if that’s what you want to call it, with a lot of fire and a lot of vigour. ”
Bill Livingstone said the idea that he should record some of his own piobaireachd repertoire arose from other people’s encouragement to do so, and from retailers who told him they saw a market for such an album.
“At first I thought I was simply recording some of my favourite tunes to put out there for listening enjoyment. With Doug Stronach co-producing, I got into the recording phase a good four years ago,” he said. “It’s taken a long time just because of what I do for a living, other commitments and that sort of thing.
“But I got four, five, six, eight, 12 tunes down… and then I realised that this thing was taking a shape I hadn’t anticipated.
“I saw that the listener wouldn’t know anything about how the music had got into the final shape it was in; I began thinking about all of the experiences I’ve had in piping. I’ve been blessed with amazing instruction and I thought it would be interesting to talk a little about how my teachers felt about piobaireachd, and how they imparted that. Some musical explanation about how I got to play the way I do seemed important. And that’s how it came to take this shape of a ‘piobaireachd diary’.
“I hope the recordings are good enough to be educational but, please… not ‘instructional’. The music is there to enjoy and to maybe attract into the piobaireachd audience some people who might otherwise not take an interest in it.”
IT was as a four-year old that Bill Livingstone’s interest was aroused by the piping tuition his father was giving his older brother, Ranald, and the step from persistent little eavesdropper to enthusiastic young learner was soon taken.
After hearing the 14 year-old Bill Livingstone play in an amateur competition, Pipe Major John Wilson, who had emigrated to Toronto from Edinburgh, told his parents that he thought the youngster had exceptional potential and offered to teach him.
“It was arranged that I’d go through to Toronto and board with an elderly couple so that I could take lessons with John Wilson,” said Bill Livingstone. And this gave him his introduction to piobaireachd.
John Wilson gave me instruction in the Lament for Sir James MacDonald of the Isles and The Bells of Perth … and then some unfortunate occurrences happened with my landlady who got into the cooking sherry and tried to blow up the house with the gas oven.
“My mother happened to be there at the time so I was hauled away, and that was it, I never saw another piobaireachd until I was 27 and had finished law school.”
That was when he heard a pipe band playing and was smitten anew. It was 1969.
“Piping is like malaria,” he said. “You suffer, always — you think you’re over it and then there’s a relapse.
“I called up John Wilson and asked if he remembered me. He did, and he took me on and that’s when I started studying and playing piobaireachd really seriously.
“The ages from 17 to 27 are, for many pipers, the decisive years. You’re never going to have faster or more flexible hands and you’re getting mature enough to really understand, appreciate and deliver the music.
“Those years were lost to me but, on the other hand, my career at the back end was extended because I wasn’t burned out with competing.
“Most pipers give it up at 40 or 45 and I’m still very actively playing. You lose some of the facility. When I was 16, I could play anything at any speed; I can’t do that now but I can play a lot smarter and with a lot more emotion. And I’m doing it out of a different context.”
BILL LIVINGSTONE is one of the very few top level solo players who also leads a top level pipe band. His 78th Fraser Highlanders, formed in 1982, in 1987 became the first band from outside Scotland to win the World Pipe Band Champion title. It has made the prize list at the “Worlds” 11 times. In Canada, the band has won both the North American Pipe Band Championship at Maxville, Ontario, and the Canadian Pipe Band Championship at Cambridge, Ontario, 12 times.
But it has also become widely known for its stage shows in Canada, Scotland and the United States, and a string of successful albums, mostly deriving from the concerts, that have taken its music far beyond the competing arena and helped attract a wider public to piping.
“I believe piping can be made accessible and enjoyable to complete non pipers, to people who simply like music,” said Bill Livingstone. “I see developments in piping now leading to the bagpipe being used in a broad orchestral idiom; it’s a natural direction for piping to take now that techniques are available to record the pipes really well and there are producers who are knowledgeable about the instrument and its tonality, and aware of what works with it and what does not.”
The obstacle to the great Highland bagpipe’s wider acceptance that most keenly irritates Bill Livingstone is the number of people who shamelessly and without hesitation play it badly in public.
“It’s one of my pet peeves about the bagpipe that, with the possible exception of the violin, no instrument, played badly, sounds worse.
“The bagpipe played badly is a nightmare. By and large, when it’s played publicly, that’s been the case: it’s horrible… awful. That’s the real problem with the bagpipe; that’s why it’s treated with disdain and as a joke.
“And that’s the obstacle we have to overcome.
“The guys who do all of our stage production had done every kind of music and theatre you could imagine, but they’d never previously had anything to do with bagpipes.
“When we brought them in, they were very reluctant because — whoa… bagpipes!
“Then, the first time we worked together, they were mind-boggled that you could have 18 people strike up in perfect unison and play in perfect tune, and in pleasing tune. They’d never heard anything like it.
“The average person who doesn’t know anything about pipes is struck the same way when they hear the instrument played well and beautifully. They’re amazed.”
Today’s teaching capacity and methods, the teaching of music theory, recordings and better instruments are making good piping more accessible, and are eradicating whatever excuses people may have had to play badly in public in the past, he said. “As is the fact that there are so many good players now.
“There’s so much more depth, particularly in Scotland,” he said. “When I started playing at Inverness and Oban, there were 45 competitors for the gold medal. Now there are 45 in the gold medal and 45 in the silver medal and they’re turning people away in big numbers… and they’re all really good players.
“Moreover, everyone now at the top level has an instrument that’s beautifully in tune and the intervals are all correct,” he said.
“When I started competing in Scotland, I can remember people asking with shock and horror, ‘my god, how could you use that kind of tape on your chanter!’
“The answer was obvious to me: you were doing it because it was such a very common thing to hear in Scotland a chanter that had a sharp low G, a sharp D, a flat E, a very flat F, a high G you could shave with and a high A that was just a notch and a half above high G: it was horrible.
“Now, that isn’t the case. What you have now is an instrument that is no longer even remotely connected to B flat — everybody’s playing at a pitch well above that. And it’s a true mixolydian scale with all of the intervals exactly right, including high G which is just a flattened seventh: it’s not complicated.”
It does still become problematic, however, when playing with other instruments, but experimentation, he said, was leading towards “something that is really quite refined in terms of solo piping recordings.
“But it’s almost mandatory that you do it in a studio where you can manipulate the pitches of other instruments to the pitch of the bagpipe.”
Bill Livingstone hopes to release a CD later in the year — an album with the tentative title of Northern Man — that will be the product of his own composition, some innovative orchestration and arranging, and a lot of studio input from Doug Stronach as producer
“He’s doing extraordinary work,” he said. “I think it will be fresh and different, and pleasing to the general audience.”
Bill Livingstone has admiration for a lot of the work that is being done along these lines — “I can listen to Fred Morrison all the time, and Roddy MacDonald’s recent recording is absolutely lovely” — but, he said, “ I find there’s some failure of taste at times.
“There are a lot of recordings involving other instruments today that I find clever but annoying.
“Having said that, there are lots of exceptions and I believe in that kind of a project. I think there’s a real place for it … and the pipers who are making some of these recordings can play amazingly well.”
THE 78th Fraser Highlanders, meanwhile, is re-consolidating after a bold but unsuccessful experiment that saw jazz and mainstream drumming star John Fisher taken into the drum corps. “John’s an absolute genius but the reality was that he’s tied to Vancouver on the west coast,” said Bill Livingstone. “His living is in Vancouver and it simply wasn’t workable.
“We now have Drew Duthart managing the drum corps and doing a wonderful job with a corps of local players: everyone comes to practice and attendance has been wonderful all year.
“We’ve been doing a very hard winter’s work. We have people coming from Pittsburgh, Kincardine, Kingston, Nova Scotia… all over the place. So we are getting a good 14-15 local players coming for regular Tuesday night practices and the last weekend of every month we have a two-day, Saturday-Sunday, practice — and we’re getting a full turnout for all of that.
“We’ve worked very hard on reconstructing the music, rebuilding the band from fundamental building blocks and getting it into top form. We’re pleased with the progress we’re making and have lots of young talent and enough older members at the other end who can provide the direction: you need that balance,” he said.
“It’s the best I’ve felt about the band in many years.
It is Bill Livingstone’s intention that the band attend every contest in Ontario in 2005 — something it has not been able to do for several seasons — and the World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow.
As a soloist, he may compete at this year’s Northern Meeting.
“I haven’t done solos seriously for a couple of years,” he said. “I’ve really confined myself to the United States Piping Foundation competition in Newark, Delaware, in June — but I won’t get to that this year because of the Hamilton, Ontario, band contest — and Inverness.
“I might get to the Northern Meeting — I no longer feel the burning need to play there I once did, but I still love to do it.”