A Healthy Band: It’s About Feeling Good

We’re entering the time of year (in the northern hemisphere, at least) where pipe bands experience a drop in consistently good attendance. For as long as I have played in bands this has been a truth. From January through to March a good whack of the band, a sizable group of people (usually the same), fail to attend, or attend sporadically, due to “busy-ness” – or whatever. Excuses are legion and, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker [she of “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”], they run the gamut from A to B. The reasons may be unique to those “busy” but to core membership – and every band has a hardcore group of members that keep the ship afloat – they bore.
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A New Kind of Pipe Band

The last couple of weeks have seen a surprising spike in the disappearance of drum corps leadership around the world. I know it’s a temporary moment of change for all affected bands and a coincidence that so many top bands have experienced big drum corps change but…I wonder.
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What Makes a Good Pipe Band Score Sheet?

Having been around the game a while it sort of stands to reason that I will have seen a whackload of pipe band “score sheets”; you know, those near-impossible to read pages (sometimes due to penmanship) passed to bands following the announcement of results. And yay, reason prevails: I have.

It’s on these pages that bands usually learn what adjudicators thought of their competitive performance – and, by the way, it’s from these pages that pipebandspeople generally judge adjudicators. I’m a sentimental sort, believe it or not, and have, truth be told, quite a few pages dating back to my earliest times with bands laying around the old archives – and some recent artefacts, too.
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Band Travel

A quick note as I sit in a sunny Glasgow cafe digesting the entertaining editorial that was the band’s score sheets from yesterday’s contest in Dunoon (what a great day, by the way – congrats to Boghall! I’ll share more when I have easier access to technology).
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Gimme Shelter

This is Worlds week and as usual the city of Glasgow is thronging with pipers and drummers and all kinds of related Piping Live! events. It’s looking like a damp week (to put it mildly) is in store for pipers and drummers. Between “heavy rain showers”, “light rain showers” and “light rain” the cape carriers of the pipe band world will be sure to be under-employed. A good thing a lot of the Piping Live! events are either indoors or under cover.
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Just as I Would’ve Played It

A while back I was going on about how I thought most of us go about listening to music – specifically, bagpipe music. My ramble was around how we should try and get over the discomfort we feel (that’s the delicate way of putting it) when we hear musical interpretations outside of what we’re used to hearing – or playing.
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Bring on the Giraffes: Blair Drummond

Have you ever considered, thought about, reflected on, what pipe tune you may’ve have played the most in your life? What melody you, as a piper – or, as an accompanist, a drummer – have played more than any other? Have wiggled your fingers, twisted your wrists, and aimed to be true to the score of more than any other that was ever written? I have. And my burned-on-the-brain, firmly committed-to-muscle-memory, impaled-on-the-hard-drive? Well, here’s a hint: it’s the name of a Scottish “safari park”.
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Rab Wallace / College of Piping Down on Canada?

I was at band practice today and one of the guys mentioned they’d come across a blurb on Rab Wallace’s blog where he slagged off the Toronto Police Pipe Band. How odd, I thought. Rab’s always been nothing but a professional when it comes to providing considered opinion. Anyway, I’m home now and checked out the offending words. And surprise: they’re offending. Here’s one of his entries:
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Poetic Passion

A thought today, just as we enter the fray of the sometimes twisted piping/pipe band “music season”:
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5 Seminal Moments in Pipe Band History

The trouble with trying to nail down a seminal moment is you can only really choose from your own experience – moments you’ve lived through – or – imagine past “moments” in history and choose accordingly. Either way, in picking important moments in time, no matter how thoughtful and reflective you think you’ve been, it all comes down to opinion. And we all know the world needs more of that.

In this list I’ve stayed away from competition winning streaks; I’m not sure record-breaking fits in that well with the definition I’m using: those moments that might be defined as “highly original and influencing the development of future events”.

So here’re my five “seminal” moments; I haven’t cast them in stone, of course, and these could all change tomorrow:
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