Piping Press

It is always worthwhile reading Alistair Aitken’s well thought out articles, more so as the contagion continues. Ontario’s beleaguered woes wear on with Maxville and the North American Championships cancelled again. But maybe the RSPBA can pull it off at the Green, with sufficient willing horses coping with the reduction in preparation time. But pipe bands can be viral also, and we miss the infection of enthusiasm and the spreading…

We should temper our reading of this week’s story on the introduction of school’s piping instructors almost 50 years ago with the unpleasant fact that not all appointments were a success. I could name three or four tutors from back then who were just not up to the job. Many children suffered from the negligence and incompetence of these poor teachers. Worse, public employee union tape meant they could not…

Pierre Blanchet is a Breton pipe-maker. He started playing the pipes at the age of 11 in 1958 in the Saint Nazaire area in the south of Brittany. He was given a set of pipes made by Dorig Le Voyer with only one tenor drone and gradually began to make progress as a player. Listening to other players, everything was done by ear with no staff notation, just a system…

Fifty years ago three giants of piping were locked in a negotiation that was to change the face of the music in this country. Captain John MacLellan (l), John MacFadyen (centre) and Seumas MacNeill, our own ‘Three Wise Men’, were about to convince the civil service bods at the Scottish Education Department that the national instrument, the great Highland bagpipe, should be a suitable instrument for the country’s music exams….

In looking for things to do to break the monotony of the latest lockdown restrictions in Scotland I came across copies of two articles relating to the teaching of pipe band drumming which were given to me a long time ago by Allan Chatto from Sydney in Australia.  The articles, written probably in the 1940s or 50s for the then Piping, Drumming and Highland Dancing Journal, were by two of…