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00:21 My name's Finlay MacDonald, I am the Artistic Director of Piping Live! Piping Festival
00:27 and we're launching the 2024 Piping Live! Festival today.
00:31 This is our 21st festival, coming of age some may say,
00:35 and it's just, you know, we're really humbled and excited to be here 21 years later.
00:42 We all know and we've all heard about the troubles that the creative industries and festivals are going through at the moment,
00:48 so we're really pleased and humbled to be funded and helped out by all our supporters.
00:55 The festival runs from the 10th to the 18th of August,
00:58 and since its start it's always been about celebrating all different kinds of piping.
01:04 Piping is all over the world, piping happens in pretty much every country,
01:09 but for Scotland our whole point here is to celebrate that
01:13 and bring in people that might not always normally play pipes or be involved in piping,
01:18 because it's a big celebration, it's about taking part in the wider cultural events that surround the music.
01:24 So it's all about friendship, it's about coming along, it's about family, it's about taking part.
01:29 We have come and try sessions for people that have never tried pipes but quite fancy it.
01:34 We've got the Big Band Parade, which is the equivalent of a 5k or a 10k,
01:39 where people contribute to the charity and take part in that kind of mass parade on the first Monday of the festival.
01:45 We've got artists from over 25 countries that take part in the festival.
01:50 This year in particular we've got a great group coming from Sweden,
01:55 a great piper, Oncio Lorenzo, who's from Galicia in the north-west of Spain,
02:00 Canada, New Zealand, Germany, Australia, so it really is an international festival.
02:05 The gig we're having here at St Luke's is a really cool gig with an amazing band called Croft No. 5,
02:12 who combine traditional folk music with all sorts of other influences from rock to hip-hop
02:19 to rap, and they're collaborating with a brilliant piper called Ailish Sutherland.
02:25 Also on that bill is a great creative musician from Glasgow, John Mulhern,
02:31 and he's putting on his show of an album he made actually right over the road in the pipe factory here in the east end of Glasgow.
02:39 So he's recreating that album in this venue, which is literally a stone's throw from where he recorded it a few years ago.
02:46 So it's going to be a really special festival.
02:49 One of my favourite things about the whole festival is seeing how Glasgow just opens up to everyone that's involved in it.
02:55 So whether it's the pipe bands playing down Buchanan Street, or the solo competitors,
03:00 or the bands that have travelled in from New Zealand, Australia, Canada,
03:04 they're always met with such a warm welcome, and it really does make the whole city just kind of buzz
03:10 and brings it alive in that week in August.
03:13 I'm Emma Hill, I play the pipes with the Glasgow Sky Association pipe band.
03:18 I'm so excited to be involved with Piping Live this year.
03:21 I'm really looking forward to getting to all the gigs and then finishing off at the World Pipe Band Championships with the band in Grade 2.
03:28 It's so exciting, it's amazing getting to celebrate all the different styles of pipe music and just be involved with everyone.
03:35 Everyone's such a great team, and I can't wait to meet some new people as well and have a listen to some new piping music.
03:41 It's so amazing, the atmosphere is absolutely incredible.
03:44 You get pipe bands from all over the world, and you get to see your friends as well from other pipe bands.
03:50 You get to compete against all these amazing pipers, and it's just an amazing atmosphere to be a part of.
03:55 And Piping Live, is it something that bands and participants look forward to all year?
04:00 It is, yeah. I think it's kind of, for us pipers anyway, it's a very exciting time of year.
04:05 Again, just getting to celebrate all the different styles.
04:08 It's something different from the Highland Pipes that we play, which is always really exciting to get to hear as well.
04:13 Are you confident you might get placed?
04:16 Aye, I think so, yeah. We're hoping for a good run this year.
04:19 The band's doing really well, but yeah, I won't give too much away on that.
04:23 I'm John Mulhern. Piping Live's a major part of the landscape in the piping community, and I guess in the broader traditional music community too.
04:33 21 years now the festival's been going, so it's great, especially in the current climate, that we're able to keep the festival going.
04:43 Largely just down to the support of our amazing community around about the piping centre, and the supporters, and just music fans in general,
04:53 that are actually helping us to get the festival off the ground again.
04:57 For pipers in particular, it forms the lead up to the World Pipe Band Championships.
05:03 Historically that week would have been known as the World's Week, if you like, the World Pipe Band Championships.
05:10 The city itself, Glasgow, has a major influx of pipers and drummers from all across the world, and the festival certainly capitalises upon that.
05:21 So from a piping point of view, that's a particularly interesting thing.
05:25 And then I think another interesting thing in terms of the time of the festival,
05:31 one of the other major traditional music festivals in the city would obviously be Celtic Connections in January,
05:37 so Piping Live, in a smaller sense, forms a counterbalance to that at the opposite side of the year.
05:47 Conceptually the festival's really about showcasing just how broad the tradition is,
05:52 and not just Scotland's piping tradition as well, but piping traditions from across the world.
05:57 So here in Scotland we've got a very strong historical association with competitive piping,
06:03 which is represented in a number of events throughout the programme.
06:07 But on top of that we've got pipe band events, through to folk events.
06:12 On the Monday night of the festival we have a relatively new addition to our programme,
06:17 the Kjolnúr night, which is an experimental music night,
06:22 which is really pushing at the outer fringes of what bagpipes are doing in the wider world of music now.
06:29 And in addition to that, bagpipes from various other parts of the world.
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