Category: Blog

New Announcements from the Piobaireachd Society

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Texan Piper Mike Cusack has accepted an invitation to join the Piobaireachd Society’s prestigious Music Committee. Mike, pictured above, is a double Gold Medallist and winner of all the major piobaireachd prizes some many times over. He recently retired as Head Master of St Thomas’s Episcopal School in Houston and still plays with the school alumni pipe band. He is the second North American to join the committee. Jack Lee,…

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Con Ó Conaill – A Tireless Servant to Pipe Bands in Ireland and Worldwide

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The AGM of the Irish Pipe Band Association witnessed a watershed moment when the association’s long-serving and much respected president Con Ó Conaill stepped down after 47 years in the service of the pipe band community.  Con was born and reared in Ballymurphy, Innishannon, Co Cork. As a youth, Con showed himself to be academically talented winning a scholarship to secondary school. By Brian McMahon After school he worked in…

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Editor’s Notebook: P/M Barnes BEM/ Lady Lever Park/ John MacFadyen/ SPA Amateurs 1970

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Welcome back everyone and I hope you all had a good New Year break. First off I want to congratulate my old mucker Robert Barnes on being awarded the BEM in HM The King’s New Year Honours. No one deserves recognition more than Barney. He’s been teaching kids in Fife and generally contributing to the Kingdom’s piping for 50 plus years. He is what we call in Scotland a ‘lad…

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Editor’s Notebook: RSPBA Branch Reorganisation/ Prize Pipes/ Cailean’s Card/ NZ School/ Edinburgh Police Solos 1971

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Whilst we are focussed on the matter of the ‘missing majors’ I think it would also be sensible if the RSPBA formally rationalised their branches. It is a good while now since the demise of the Fife and Central Scotland branches with their bands being absorbed into either Lothian & Borders or Dundee, Perth & Angus. But the names no longer make sense. All the former Central Scotland Branch bands…

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History: John MacFadyen Hails Angus MacKay’s Book as a Work of a Genius

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Fifty years ago John MacFadyen, award winning piper, teacher, administrator, wrote a review of a new edition of Angus MacKay’s historically crucial work, ‘A Collection of Ancient Piobaireachd’. The following is from this review, published in the Oban Times in 1973 in John’s ‘Piping World’ column… Conditioned by the materialism of the society in which we live my first reaction to the news that a reprint Angus MacKay’s ‘Collection of…

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