PIPERS from all over the world are pouring into Scotland this week as the biggest global piping festival kicks off in Glasgow.
Piping Live, which kicks off tomorrow, has been running since 2003. It features solo piping competitions, folk concerts, pipe band performances in George Square and it's own talent contest in the form of Pipe Idol. The festival also takes in the World Pipe Band Championships, set up in the 1930s, which sees hundreds of bands from the global piping community take part.
Last year a survey commissioned by the consultancy Economic and Social Development (EKOS) found that the festival attracted a record breaking 41,131 tourists to the city, generating an estimated £2.3 million for the local economy and organisers are planning for a similar success this year.
Love them of loathe them the bagpipes are not only Scotland's national instrument but one of its most widespread exports. Although discouraged during Jacobite times they were later adopted by the British state. Pipers were prominent throughout Highland military regiments during the expansion of the British Empire as well as World World I and II.
Festival director Roddy Macleod said: "Scotland is synonymous with the Highland bagpipes and it's reached all corners of the world principally the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries. The military tradition is largely responsible.
"Glasgow is the mecca for piping, it hosts the World Pipe Band Championships, it's always had a big Highland community so there was a really solid foundation for a piping festival. It's an international event, it doesn't only bring in Highland pipers from all over the world but also reaches out to all the other piping traditions."
Pipers from Brittany, where they play the high pitched Binioù, Spanish Galician gaita players and traditional Torupill players from Estonia are also on the bill. Hungarian and Czech pipers will also bring their own versions of the instrument.
Irish folk musician Robin Morton, manager of legendary folk group the Battlefield Band, who will headline at Piping Live – and who were one of the first Scottish folk outfits to use bagpipes as part of their line up – said the piping scene had been transformed in recent years, making the festival an exciting and eclectic global event.
"Back in the seventies serious pipers only played competition music and anything else was disparagingly known as 'kitchen music'," he said. "The Battlefield Band and the Tannahill Weavers were the only folk bands using pipers then. Now you are tripping over pipers playing in them. This is a really great festival that brings in people from across the world and really shows what's going on in the scene now."
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