PIPING

The Highland Games event offers individual competitions for the Highland Bagpipes, Side Drum, Tenor Drum, and Bass Drum.

Pipe band competitions are also held, including the Drum Major competition. One of the most impressive sights of the Highland Games is the massed bands, where all of the competing pipe bands march onto the field together and play some of Scotland’s favourite tunes.

Registration for Piping & Drumming plus registration for Bands for the 2013 Calgary Highland Games is now open on the Alberta Society of Pipers and Drummers Website. Please follow this link to the registration page.

2012 PIPING & DRUMMING RESULTS

2011 PIPING & DRUMMING RESULTS

    CUSGA is pleased to offer Scholarships and Bursaries to competitors to help them in the pursuit of their education and highland arts.

HISTORY

The Bagpipe in Canada

The sound of the bagpipe is wafted down the centuries carrying the theme of Scotland’s story; now lilting softly, now challenging fiercely, but ever in tune with the national mood. The pipes came to Canada about 200 years ago.  Scottish fur traders and adventurers brought the instrument with them to beguile the tedium of long months and years in isolated trading posts.  In 1759 it brought inspiration to Wolfe’s Highlanders at the capture of Quebec.  It is recorded that at one point in the fighting which followed the climb to the Heights of Abraham, the invaders had begun to waver.  The pipes, silent till then, were hurriedly brought into action.  Rallying to their war slogan the Highlanders took fresh heart and pressed on to victory.

Wherever the Scot has settled he has brought his pipes along, partly as a solace in his loneliness and partly as a means of expressing an exuberant pride of race.

During the First World War Canada equipped ad sent overseas between 25 and 30 pipe bands.  To the bagpipe belongs the distinction of being the only musical instrument to actually go ‘over the top’ in battle.  At the final “Cease fire” sounded, the skirl of the pipes heralded the entry of Canadian troops into Mons.

Since the war something like a piping renaissance has swept not only Scotland and Canada but the United States as well.  The Highland Gathering, long a picturesque feature of Canadian Scottish community  life, has taken a fresh lease of life.  In the west new gatherings spring up every year.  A recent survey (1930s) shows that there are something like 60 pipe bands in Canada, including the country’s 17 Highland regiments.  Though jazz bands and orchestras wilt before the onward sweep of radio and “the talkies”, the bagpipe maintains the even tenor of its way.  Serenely indifferent to the musical mode of the moment, the piper marches on, a last lone minstrel from the golden age of romance.

Taken from an article written by Pipe Major Stephen MacKinnon and published in the Canadian Geographical Journal, April 1932.  Pipe Major MacKinnon was the winner of the piping competition at the first Calgary Highland Games on August 9, 1913.