The annual Springbank Invitational Solo Piping Competition has been cancelled for 2020. Competition organiser, the Kintyre Piping Society, hopes to be in a position in the near future to hold it next year. The competition usually takes place in mid-September in the Argyll town, Campbeltown and is sponsored by the […]
The five pipers who will perform at this year’s online Pipe Major Alasdair Gillies Memorial Recital Challenge are: Roddy MacLeod MBE, Stuart Liddell, Angus MacColl, Callum Beaumont and Connor Sinclair. The competition, part of Piping Live!, takes place behind closed doors at the National Piping Centre in Glasgow on Thursday, […]
The draw (and tunes to be played) for this year’s online Silver Chanter is: Connor Sinclair (Lament for Donald Bàn MacCrimmon); Stuart Liddell (Lament for the Children); Sarah Muir (Lament for the Earl of Antrim); Callum Beaumont (Lament for MacLeod of Colbecks); Iain Speirs (Lament for MacSwan of Roaig); Fred […]
The pull of the Great Highland Bagpipe shows no signs of stopping. A pipe band comprised of Hindu pipers and drummers has been featured recently on US television channel, CNN. The Shree Muktajeevan Swamibapa Pipe Band is based in Secaucus, New Jersey. In reality, though, it is one of five […]
Tommy Johnston died in hospital on Tuesday night after a short illness. He was 65. Tommy was an immensely popular figure in piping and piping band circles. In the mid-1990s he set up Pipe Dreams with fellow ScottishPower Pipe Band member, Ronnie McShannon. The two launched their popular Ezeedrone drone […]
A week on Saturday – August 8 – the 54th annual Silver Chanter competition will take place. The invited pipers are Sarah Muir, Fred Morrison, Callum Beaumont, Stuart Liddell, Connor Sinclair, and Iain Speirs. Murray Henderson is the judge and James Beaton is on fear an tighe duties. As we […]
By Roderick Cannon This well known air has had a varied history, in the course of which it has become separated into at least two distinct tunes, played on the pipes as a slow march and a jig. It first appears in Patrick MacDonald’s collection of Highland Vocal Airs (1784), […]
The Royal Scottish Pipe Band Association is one of the cultural organisations in Scotland to to be offered financial support while they remain affected by lockdown restrictions. The Scottish Government announced a £10m funding package yesterday to help the events sector recover from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Funding streams will […]
In the penultimate part of our serialisation of the life of James MacHardy, piper to Queen Victoria from 1878 until 1881, his daughter, Edith Paterson takes us into the 1930s. Our second spell at Whitehouse was father’s most prolific seas of composition. I would return late from helping with a […]
Why is the Great Highland Bagpipe our instrument of choice? In what was originally a précis of a lecture which ‘Fergus’* delivered to the musicology department of an American university, we publish today a piece written in praise of the instrument. Comparisons are odious, but in the course of art […]
