Well, I guess it’s a stretch, but I had this literary device hanging over me, so I decided to use part of it right away.

Two weeks ago the Midwest Highland Arts Fund held their Annual Winter Storm Weekend, an indoor piping and drumming competition. The competition draws top pipers from across North America and even a few overseas competitors. The judging panel is drawn from the World’s top pipers and many other distinguished players show up to perform at the big concert and give workshops. Angus MacColl is a regular in Kansas City and others you can expect to find in town include Alasdair Gillies, Mike Cusack, Willie McCallum, Andrew Wright, Fred Morrison, and so the list goes on - you get the idea.

The performers in the Gold and Silver Medal competitions played tunes from the respective 2008 Piobaireachd Society set tune lists, the first outings for these tunes this year. A few recordings of the proceedings are now available. Go to Ken Eller’s Captain’s Corner site for the prize winning tunes. Ken was MC for the events and also made recordings.

In addition, a couple of the performances have shown up on YouTube. I particularly enjoyed Donald MacPhee’s performance of The Clan MacNab’s Salute. This is not a tune I knew before, but I have listened to it several times now and it’s really growing on me. You have to listen in two parts, but it’s still worth the effort.

I hope there were some people there with professional sound equipment, since it would be good if some of the piping radio shows would carry these performances. In any case, enjoy the tunes!

That is my fictitious name for a new pipe band, formed by Roddy MacLeod, M.B.E., Principal of the National Piping Center.

In my previous post I wrote about Roddy’s new piobaireachd website. Well, apparently it’s not enough to be organizing that and running the Piping Centre. He has gathered a group of world-class solo pipers to populate a new band, with the goal of playing at the World Pipe Band Championships.

The pipe corps, as announced so far, claims a total of 14 Highland Society of London Gold Medals and reads like a Who’s Who of current piping.

Aside from being really, really exciting to hear an all-star band of this calibre play, it also muddies the waters of the FMM/SFU/Shotts cartel at the top of the pipe band world.

This should be fun..

Something New first.

A couple of months ago I wrote about an incipient new piobaireachd resource I had discovered while speculatively trawling the web - a site of performance downloads from Roddy MacLeod, M.B.E.

Roddy is one of the World’s top pipers and is the Principal of the National Piping Centre in Glasgow. His piobaireachd site is now up and running, with a great list of big tunes for download. His performances are always a joy to listen to, and this site makes available performances, together with music scores and canntaireachd, so it becomes a useful teaching resource. Like the teaching recordings of his namesake, Donald, I think this will become a beneficial resource for all pipers interested in piobaireachd.

And now for Something Old:

Ceol Sean, the publisher of bagpipe music books on CD, has been working with world-renowned piobaireachd performer Jim McGillivray and Dr. William Donaldson, author of the excellent series of articles on piobaireachd on Pipes|Drums, to make some original piobaireachd manuscripts available online. It would appear that more will be available in the future, but for now they have posted:

• Angus MacKay’s MS
• David Glen’s MS
• Peter Reid’s MS
• The Nether Lorn MS (the Campbell Canntaireachd)

…just to get you started! The Angus MacKay MS dates from the 1830’s and it alone contains almost 200 tunes. I have only just begun to explore the contents of these old manuscripts, but I’m sure it will repay the effort. There are tunes I have never heard of and that are rarely played - it’s great that these tunes will most likely become an active part of the repertoire once more.

Look out for Somethings Borrowed and Blue in future posts…