Scottish Schools Pipe Band Championship – Full Report

From our Juvenile Grade correspondent…….With almost 100 band performances across eight competition segments, it was a full pattern and a very positive sight to behold. Band members hustling and bustling along corridors from their respective warm up rooms to final tuning and three performance spaces. A wide spread of Grade 1 superstars coaching their charges and, in amongst those last minute alterations, tuning, coaching and the general buzz, many readers…

Results and Comments on the Archie Kenneth Quaich 2018

  By Peter McCalister This was a smaller contest than previous due to severe snow on the day and the two days before. We had 25 pipers initially on the list and on the day 13 appeared. Those included pipers from the USA, Germany, and the frozen West of Scotland. A lot of effort was made to attend in these difficult circumstances – so thanks go to all of them,…

Metro Cup: P/Sgt Duncan Shows Army Piping is at the Forefront Once More

Off the back of his successes in professional solo piping competitions in 2017, Sgt Ben Duncan from the Army School of Bagpipe Music & Highland Drumming was invited to play in the Metro Cup Invitational Piping Competition held in Newark, New Jersey. The competition took place in the Ramada Plaza Newark Liberty Airport Hotel on the 17th February 2018. This was a great opportunity for Ben and one of his…

Boney Invitational Results and Report

Robert MacNeill of the BC Pipers’ Association reports: The 2018 Boney Music Memorial Invitational Piping Competition and Recital was a great success, raising over $2170 [£1,228 approx.] for brain cancer research for the British Columbia Cancer Foundation, $828 [£468 approx.] of it from the livestreaming viewers. The BC Pipers’ Association continued the event that Andrew Bonar began in 2016 to utilize piping to further advance charitable causes. The players Kevin McLean,…

PP Ed's Blog: Two New Books Reviewed/ Northern Winter School/ South Florida

I am always struck by the gratitude of students. At last year’s Northern Winter School Horst Krauss  presented me with this fine book ‘The Bagpipe – The History of a European Folk Instrument in Pictures’ by Fritz Schneider. The well-written text is in four languages, including English, and is graced with  beautifully reproduced photographs. It says this about the GHB: ‘The British brought the Scottish bagpipe to the once worldwide…