By HAMISH MOORE. I’d like to announce news of a newly devised piping competition with none of the conventional rules or standards applying. The rationale behind establishing this competition is: piping has, over time, consistently been losing connections with its Gaelic roots. This connection was once central to, and at the […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey. Piping Today #87 • 2017. Every June in the town where I live there’s something called Buskerfest. It’s pretty much what you’d expect: a festival of street performers. The whole of the main drag in town is taken over by a good cross-section of the […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey. Piping Today #86 • 2017. To be clear and direct in communicating – getting across what you really feel to your fellow person – must surely be one of the rarest of human traits. In my experience, it’s the norm for people to often do […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey. Piping Today #85 • 2017. It was the moon on nights like this, it was nights like this, it was the wind as it pawed at you or cried as it approached, the sound of the river, the clotted stars against the dark sky, the […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey. November 2023. Going along to get along. You may know that I have landed unexpectedly and feet first in the land of pipe bands. Where, say, this past summer I was on the periphery – a listener, a judge, a toe-tapping outsider – this autumn […]
The 27th Annual George Sherriff Memorial Invitational will held on on Saturday, November 18 at St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, Ontario. The competition is organised by the ubiquitous Bob Worrall, who is currently travelling to Scotland to judge at the 50th Glenfiddich Piping Championship this weekend. The George Sherriff Memorial […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey. Piping Today #84, 2017. Anyone who uses Facebook will know that from time to time there are interesting bits of information that break through the often unfiltered cringe-making that is the backbone of social media. And so it was last week, smashing through a sea […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey. Piping Today #83, 2016. When I first starting competing in Scotland and going around the competitions, there was no shortage of fun to go along with the games. Like today, only it seems to me that then there were more eccentric, larger-than-life types around the […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey. Piping Today #82, 2016. There was a time when I thought that one of the hardest things I’d ever done in my life was to play Peter MacLeod’s tune Donald MacLean, twice through in the jig final at the Northern Meeting. John Burgess, ever the […]
GREY’S NOTES by Michael Grey. Piping Today #81, 2016. It’s estimated there are over seven billion people inhabiting our dear blue place — planet earth. That’s a seven and nine absolute zeros. To me, an unimaginable number of anything, let alone a measure of human souls. And yet, time and […]
