The Annual Irish Piobaireachd Society contest was held in Gorey, Co. Wexford on Saturday, January 28th.
The event was kindly sponsored by the Wexford County Council and RG Hardie of Scotland.

Results
Overall Winner – Alastair Dunn

Beginners Piobaireachd
1st Ciara O’Connor

Intermediate Piobaireachd
1st : Collette O’Connor
2nd: Gerh Neville

Open Piobaireachd
1st: Ben Greeves
2nd: Connor Sinclair
3rd: Con Houlihan

Former Winners Piobaireachd
1st: Alastair Dunn
2nd: Andy Wilson
3rd: John Leamy

Former Winners MSR
1st: Alastair Dunn
2nd: Andy Wilson
3rd: Peter Donan

The event was judged by Tom Spiers Edinburgh.

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Jenny Hazard and Craig Muirhead – 19th February, 4pm.
Glenn Brown and Keith Bowes – 18th March, 4pm.
Final will take place on 22nd April at the usual time 4pm.

 

The free release of the book comes at a time when music publishing and copyright control is facing great change in the piping community, which has traditionally struggled to gain fair royalties for original music, let alone any kind of profit.

 

“My stuff is all over the net; you can legitimately buy and download it anywhere,” Grey said when asked why he chose to make the collection free. “But it’s also been heavily pirated, and because of that people can find it and get hold of it free. I gave up a long time ago trying to get my material pulled down from rogue music exchange sites.”

 

Music For Everyone contains several of Grey’s better-known compositions, including “Coppermill,” “The Eastern Townships,” “Fleshmarket Close” and “Sergeant Malkie Bow’s Consternation,” as well as tunes by other well known composers, such as Allan MacDonald, Gavin Stoddart and Kyle Warren.

 

“Managing your copyright could be a fairly busy job and one with potentially shaky returns,” Grey added. ”In giving it away I’m maybe throwing in the towel on making money from my music and hope that in doing this I might see some return because of my music. It’s a bit of an experiment.”

 

Grey said that he did not know whether future collections will be offered for free or not, or whether he will make other previous books similarly available.

 

“We’ll see. I did buy a lottery ticket today so there’s a chance,” he said.

 

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The Grade 2 Penetangore Pipe Band of Kincardine, Ontario, has appointed Jamie Connolly as its new pipe-major after the previous leader emigrated from Canada to settle in Europe.

Connolly has a long history of leadership experience in the top grades. He was previously pipe-major of the Toronto Transit Commission, Dofasco, Celtic Flair and the MacNaughton Highlanders, all maintaining places in Grade 2 and occasionally challenging at the Grade 1 level.

Connolly joins Leading-Drummer Harvey Dawson and the band will continue to work with Music Director Jake Watson, who is also Pipe-Sergeant of the Grade 1 Peel Regional Police Pipe Band.

In statement from the band, Connolly was described as having “a very positive and progressive teaching methodology” that he will bring to Penetangore.

Jamie Connolly replaces Doug Wickham, who led the band for two seasons.

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As one of the pipe band world’s oldest franchises, the Lothian & Borders Police have more than a century of tradition to look back upon, and the band’s January 28th concert at Celtic Connections will pay homage to that legacy through a very modern lens.

New L&B Pipe-Major Neil Hall said that despite his recent heavy travel schedule, which prevented him from revealing plans earlier, the band is primed and ready to unveil a score of creative material.

“[The band is] excited about the forthcoming concert at Celtic Connections,” Hall said, and added that the concert will include a reflection piece on Pipe-Major Donald Shaw Ramsey, who led the Edinburgh City Police Pipe Band in the 1950s, taking it to World Championship victories in 1950 and ’54.

Hall said that the concert will culminate with a new suite composed by Ben Duncan, a young piper in the band, based around the Roderick Campbell-penned 2/4 march, “Edinburgh City Police Pipe Band,” one of the great tunes in the piping repertory. While looking at the past, much of the content is built around or by young players in the band, including a three-piper “tag-team” string of solo jigs.

While Lothian & Borders Police represent one of the strongest traditions in pipe band history, the band will share concert billing with the Spirit of Scotland Pipe Band, one of the least traditional and newest definitions of a “pipe band.” Spirit of Scotland forms has formed only on occasion since 2008, while the Edinburgh City / Lothian & Borders Police Pipe Band has remained a constant since 1882.

Neil Hall revealed that those attending the noon-time concert can also look forward to Ian and Alec Duncan performing a Gordon Duncan composition. Ian Duncan preceded Hall as pipe-major after a two-year stint in charge.

Much of the band’s material is arranged by Stuart Cassells, the former member of the Red Hot Chilli Pipers, known for his creative adaptations of pipe music. Lothian & Borders Police will be complemented in parts by a quartet of Celtic folk musicians at the show.

The concert comes at a time when a bill for a single Scottish police force has been tabled for a proposed “Scottish Police Authority.” It is not known how such an amalgamation of the country’s eight police forces would impact Scotland’s police bands, which include four in Grade 1: Fife Constabulary, Grampian Police, Lothian & Borders Police and Strathclyde Police. The Central Scotland Police, Dumfries & Galloway Constabulary and Northern Constabulary sponsor bands in Grade 3, Grade 2 and Grade 4, respectively, while the Tayside Police do not. The Grade 1 Tayside Police Pipe Band dissolved in 2010 and the force then discontinued the sponsorship.

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The annual “Piping Concert” at the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow next week features two bands that will make their first appearances in a full-length show, when the Spirit of Scotland and Lothian & Borders Police pipe bands share the stage at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall a noon on January 28th in a double bill that has had both groups going all out to prepare material in the off-season.

It will be the first time since Spirit of Scotland has performed as a full band since it competed at the 2008 World’s. The group has assembled especially for the show, with players travelling from various parts of the world and practicing on their own before the week of the concert.

According to Pipe-Major Roddy MacLeod, listeners can look forward to a special tribute to the late Alasdair Gillies, who played with the band in 2008, but who sadly died suddenly in August of last year. MacLeod would not elaborate, but indicated that it will key in on Gillies’s army background.

“The concert is presenting a big challenge for us again with such limited opportunity to bring people together,” MacLeod said. “Hopefully, we have put some nice music together that people will enjoy and our tribute to Alasdair Gillies will be a feature within the concert that I am sure will be a poignant moment for many people within the band and the audience.”

MacLeod said that other material will be almost all new, and a special “tag team” of the band’s most famous solo players is planned during the band’s 50-minute spot.

The Lothian & Borders Police will be playing in public for the first time under new Pipe-Major, Neil Hall, who did not respond to inquiries about his band’s plans for the show.

The 2012 Celtic Connections will be the eighteenth festival, which also features several other piping-related performances, including an annual Gordon Duncan Recital on January 29th at the National Piping Centre, featuring invited performers Angus MacColl, Alexis Meunier and Robert Watt.

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Kansas City, Missouri – January 13, 2012 – Alex Gandy won the Gold Medal Piobaireachd event, while Andrew Carlisle took home the top light music award and Colin Clansey won the Silver Medal Piobaireachd contest at the annual Winter Storm competitions, part of the weekend of workshops, contests and performances staged by the Midwest Highland Arts Fund.

 

Gold Medal Piobaireachd

1st Alex Gandy, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia

2nd Jori Chisholm, Seattle

3rd Andrew Lee, Vancouver

Judges: Roddy MacLeod, Willie McCallum, Jack Taylor

 

Gold Medal Light Music (MSRHJ)

1st Andrew Carlisle, Pittsburgh

2nd Alex Gandy

3rd Craig Muirhead, Glasgow

Judges: Alastair Dunn, Stuart Liddell, Roddy MacLeod

 

Silver Medal Piobaireachd

1st Colin Clansey, Ottawa

2nd Ben McClamrock, Baltimore

3rd John Lee, Vancouver

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According to organizers, more than 300 pipers and drummers have registered for the January 14-15 weekend of teaching, competitions, performances and partying at the Marriott and Holiday Inn hotels in downtown Kansas City. More than 120 competitors have entered for the various events across all solo levels of piping and drumming, including prestigious Gold Medal contests for Professional-standard players.

 

Some 23 teaching faculty will deliver group lessons over the weekend, culminating in a Saturday night concert at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed, 900-plus-seat Community Christian Church in Kansas City, and an informal “Winter Steam” drum fanfare competition. Organizers said that the concert is on track to sell-out.

 

Now in its eleventh year, Winter Storm is put together by the Midwest Highland Arts Fund, a nonprofit organization run by eight volunteer board members. More than 100 volunteers will help to execute the weekend’s activities.

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