Archive
Emerging Talent – TARRAN National Piping Centre Street Café 12 pm, August 16, 2023 TARRAN was the latest in the Piping Live! “Emerging Talent” series, and they arrived with some buzz remaining from winning the Battle of the Bands event at Glasgow’s 2023 Celtic Connections Festival. They appeared today as […]
Just after the first Covid-19 lockdown, the National Piping Centre staff was inspired to consider and understand the landscape of women in piping and drumming in Scotland. Despite the equality legislation passing in 1976, there have not been significant advancements in the numbers and level of participation in piping and pipe band drumming across all genders. The hope is that research will result in being better able to understand the landscape of women in piping and drumming in Scotland and move forward based on the findings.
Willie McCallum Lunchtime Recital National Piping Centre Auditorium 1 pm, August 16, 2023 The idea for the Piping Live! Festival was partly originally a product of highly successful noon-hour recitals designed to take advantage of all the pipers in Glasgow for the World’s. Over the 20 years since, the recitals […]
Alister Sinclair has been offering his skills to pipes|drums for years, and we’re pleased to have the world’s greatest piping and drumming photographer once again roving Piping Live! to capture what he sees. We hope you enjoy this exclusive slideshow of images from Tuesday, August 15th, Day 2 of the […]
An Evening of International Piping with the Eagle Pipers Scots Guards Club Haymarket, Edinburgh This evening of masterful piping contained a few firsts. It was the first time that The Eagle Pipers hosted a Piping Live! event at their regular location in Edinburgh; it was the first time they featured […]
The usual stowed-out Strathclyde Suite was again the venue for the International Quartet Competition, where Scotland’s Peoples Ford Boghall & Bathgate Caledonia Scotland was determined the best overall by a panel of “secret” judges scattered in the audience.
Glasgow – August 15, 2023 – Fifteen-year-old Cameron Bonar of Surrey, British Columbia, was the winner of the second round of the annual Pipe Idol competition for pipers younger than 21. The event was held at the Street Café outside of the National Piping Centre. Bonar will join Jake Roberston […]
Fergus Muirhead has been working Piping Live! events for the entire life of the festival, and he’s still doing an excellent job informing and entertaining at a variety of events. He spoke about the obvious success of teaching young people bagpipes in various parts of the world, as evidenced by both the number of pipers interested in playing in the Under 21 event and the obvious quality of those interested. This year, the heats each day feature six pipers, up two from all previous events.
Emerging Talent – Ciar Milne & Friends National Piping Centre Street Café 5 pm – Monday, August 14, 2023 One of the regular joys of Piping Live! over the last 20 years has been stumbling into a performance that you didn’t plan to see and being absolutely delighted with the […]
Against 24 other top-tier solo pipers, Bruce Gandy of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, emerged the overall winner of the Masters Solo Piping Competition held at the National Piping Centre as part of the 2023 Piping Live! Festival. With the win, Gandy earned one of the 10 spots for the 2023 Glenfiddich Championships on October 28th in Blair Atholl, Scotland, but Gandy had already qualified with his win of the Bratach Gorm at London.
Glasgow Life, co-organizers of the World Pipe Band Championships with the RSPBA, has confirmed that the Friday Grade 1 competitions will be streamed live, with the first band, New Zealand’s Auckland & District, scheduled to kick off the unrestricted MSR contest at 10:30 am GMT. Here’s the link: www.theworlds.co.uk As in […]
Glasgow – August 14, 2023 – The first full day of the 2023 Piping Live! Glasgow Festival of Piping included for the first time the British Solo Drumming Championships at the National Piping Centre, with Dublin’s Stephen Creighton, leading-drummer of Grade 1 St. Laurence O’Toole, winning the event, one of […]
Four Grade 1 bands weathered the wildly intermittent spells of, rain, wind, cloud and sunshine at the Perth Highland Games, and it was Police Scotland Fife that was the overall best, and New Zealand’s Manawatu Scottish an aggregate second with a win in the Medley and a second in the MSR. Of additional note, Canterbury Caledonian Society, also from New Zealand, took two firsts in piping in the Medley event, and Police Scotland Fife enjoyed two drumming firsts.
Heavy rain at times drenched the North Berwick Highland Games, where nine bands contested Grade 1 in two events: a Medley closed only to Grade 1 bands and an MSR that was open to Grade 1 and Grade 2 bands.
Ultimately, Inveraray & District took the Medley, while Peoples Ford Boghall & Bathgate Caledonia won the MSR, in what would be the final contest before the World Championships. The overall prize went to Inveraray & District based on RSPBA rules for such an event that dictates that the aggregate award is “decided by combined performance totals” and not combined final rankings per event.
In one of the last small contests before the World Championships, Police Scotland Fife beat Police Scotland & Federation in a two-band Grade 1 contest. No bands entered the Grade 2 event, which was won by the Juvenile George Watson’s College playing against the Grade 3 Denny & Dunipace Association.
Just more than 80 of the world’s top solo pipers will gather for the annual Northern Meeting Competitions at Inverness, Scotland, on Thursday, August 31st and Friday, September 1st. “Inverness,” as it’s casually referred to in the piping and drumming world, is anything but casual, with winners of the premier […]