Piping Press

Herewith are the playing requirements for the major championships for season 2020 as agreed by the RSPBA’s Music Board: Also announced today are all the dates for the year beginning with Bangor, Northern Ireland on May 9 and running to the World Solo Drumming on October 24. Check out the calendar here.

Some say he is at his late granny’s heilan’ hame for Hogmanay; others that he is on the slippery slopes of the Alps, or perhaps Lake Louise; but all we know he has roused himself from his slumbers, cast off the wooly hat and penned his year end review eagerly awaited by our wonderful readers. It may be an antidote to an awards industry that had just about awarded everything,…

Before another decade slips by we thought we’d have a look back at the 2009 Worlds when, on August 15th, Canada’s Simon Fraser University Pipe Band triumphed at Glasgow Green winning both the band contest and the drumming. Here’s a photo gallery of pictures from the great day for the lads and lassies from British Columbia, a day that saw them placed first in both Medley and MSR under P/M…

The Queen’s New Year’s Honour List has announced that Tom Brown, former leading drummer of Boghall and Bathgate Caledonia and tutor and mentor to hundreds of pipe band drummers, has been created a Member of the British Empire (MBE). The citation reads: ‘Thomas Johnston BROWN, Pipe Band Drummer and Instructor, Boghall and Bathgate Caledonia Pipe Band. For services to Scottish Traditional Music.’ Boghall and Bathgate owe much of their current…

Tommy Graham passed away peacefully on the Monday before Christmas surrounded by his family. He was 93. Though small in stature, Tommy was a huge character and champion of piping and pipe bands. He was the founder and pipe major of the Graham Highland Pipe Band, a band consisting mostly of members of his family. Tommy is pictured above as band P/M. He was a war hero and in later…