Mains of Fintry plays to Olympian audience

The Grade 4 Mains of Fintry Pipe Band of Dundee, Scotland, played to an audience that could number in the billions, after the band performed at the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing on August 8th.

 

The band was part of a group of several international musical acts invited by the Beijing Games organizers to play as competing athletes marched into the stadium.

 

Mains of Fintry was originally invited after Chinese officials heard the band playing in France. It took several weeks before the band realized that the invitation was not a practical joke, responded and then agreed to perform on condition of absolute secrecy before the Olympics.

 

The band is an infrequent participant at pipe band competitions, preferring instead to focus on casual performances.

 

The non-traditional tunes that the band played, such as “Balmoral” by Robert Burns, would mean a potentially huge windfall in royalties to the composers because of the massive audience that was entertained by the compositions – provided the composers registered their copyright tunes with a publishing house.