Glasgow's Piping Live! festival prepares to celebrate 20th birthday in style

As a young piper Finlay MacDonald was a poster boy for the first Piping Live! Now, two decades later, he is the festival’s artistic director, and he has big plans for next month’s anniversary celebrations, he tells Jim Gilchrist

Next month witnesses an auspicious conjunction of piping anniversaries. Not only does Glasgow’s Piping Live! festival, which runs from 12-20 August, celebrate its 20th iteration, but the Lowland and Border Pipers’ Society, which has played a significant role in the “cauld wind pipes” revival – the renaissance of Scotland’s long neglected bellows-blown pipes – celebrates its 40th year, with a concert at the Glasgow event and others during Edinburgh’s Fringe. Also, a small but influential Perthshire firm of pipemakers has issued an album of music played on their smallpipes, 20 years on from an earlier landmark recording.

Established as a week-long countdown to the grand tourney of the World Pipe Band Championships on Glasgow Green (18-19 August), Piping Live! attracts more than 30,000 attendees. Its success reflects the vigorous health of an international piping scene which these days spans establishment band and solo competition scenes as well as the ever-growing use of bagpipes across the burgeoning traditional music revival.

Finlay MacDonald, who as a young piper was a poster boy for the first Piping Live! and is now the festival’s artistic director, observes: “Piping is more popular than ever, there are more people from diverse backgrounds playing, the music is steeped in tradition as well as forward-looking and innovative. There’s a real energy in the piping and drumming scene in anticipation of Piping Live! this year and Glasgow is going to be alive with music and camaraderie.”

Finlay MacDonald, artistic director for Piping Live!, and piper Anna Smart PIC: Elaine Livingstone

The festival programme ranges from top-level solo and quartet Highland piping competitions such as the Masters Solo competition at the National Piping Centre, the hub of the festival, to more folk-orientated events. These include Canntaireachd, a promising-sounding collaboration between Gaelic singers Kim Carnie and Kathleen MacInnes, pipers Brighde Chaimbeul and Ailis Sutherland and the collective Staran.

A closing concert features longstanding festival associates Ross Ainslie and Ali Hutton, alongside Irish piper Jarlath Henderson and guitarist Innes Watson, while an “avant-garde” night presents piper and saxophonist Fraser Fifield with Estonian piper Caatlin Magi.

Marking that other anniversary, the festival features a concert mounted by the Lowland and Border Pipers’ Society (LBPS), celebrating four decades of breathing new life, as it were, into Scotland’s bellows-blown Border pipes and smallpipes, rescuing them from virtual extinction. Titled simply inB, the quartet recital features Fin Moore and Brighde Chaimbeul on Scottish smallpipes with Tiarnán Ó Duinnchinn and Louise Mulcahy on uilleann pipes.

The quartet also figures in one of two concerts the LBPS is mounting during the Edinburgh Fringe (11 and 12 August, St Mark’s Church; see www.lbps.net) and takes its name from its pipes all playing in the key of B – including smallpipes made by Fin and his father, Hamish Moore, at their Perthshire workshop, which in itself has played its part in the bellows-blown pipes revival.

Twenty years ago, the Moores were involved in an album called The Piper and The Maker, showcasing leading artists: earlier this year they released a sequel, The Piper and The Maker: Celebrating C, in which notable pipers – including Fin and Hamish, Chaimbeul, Ainsley and many others – perform using the Moores’ smallpipes, this time in C. These instruments are proving popular, says Fin, partly “because it’s a singer-friendly key, but also their pitch is kind of mid-range, with a lovely tone”.

At 44, Moore has been making pipes with his father since he was 18, and has watched the “cauld wind” scene develop significantly in the two decades since that first album. “There are more young Highland pipers than ever before, but they’re more likely to also have a set of smallpipes.”

As an indicator of their widespread acceptance, he points to Chaimbeul playing smallpipes at the opening of 2021’s COP 26 global climate summit in Glasgow, in marked contrast to the tartan-clad Highland piper customary for such occasions. Indeed, it’s been suggested that we stop referring to these pipes’ re-emergence as a revival, so well established have they become.

For Piping Live! details, see www.pipinglive.co.uk