Jointly written by David Hester & Barnaby Brown

For professional Highland bagpipers, the highest recognized achievement is currently attained in the competition environment. This fact often passes by unnoticed and unchallenged.

While this is not unique (after all, it is the same with athletes), it is a bit odd for musicians. Generally, competition success for musical artists is a stepping stone to paid work - engagements, commissions, recording projects, broadcasts - and these things are more highly valued than winning the competition.

Winners of the International Tchaikovsky Competition go on to touring and recording opportunities and the Avery Fischer career grants and prizes provide a major boost for instrumentalists who make performance their livelihood. Even X-factor winners are not expected to compete once they have won, but are provided opportunities to develop singing careers.

Not so with piping careers. There is no similar expectation. Although many top competitive pipers give recitals, instruct and record, there is no expectation for them to do so. Our competitions either lead to more competitions or are ends in and of themselves.

That wasn’t always the case. After a long pre-history with tales of competitions and fairy assistance, or pipers refusing to compete with MacCrimmon out of respect, the modern-era competitions began in 1781 with a rule that previous winners were barred. As in silver and gold medal competitions today, the top prize carried the winer to the next stage. In the 1780s, piping competitions were fundamentally motivated by a demand for pipers in the British Army, one that outstripped supply. On top of this, the competitions became showcase events for pipers to obtain professional positions with the landed gentry. But note, elite pipers post-1746 were low-caste servants. They were no longer the high-caste gentlemen they had been in the 1600s, people of a social standing that we would associate today with a university degree and a secure, full-time career path.

Fortunately, these things are changing. The Alt Pibroch Club would therefore like to initiate (or join in on) serious conversations contemplating what lies beyond winning the Clasp at Inverness or the Senior Piobaireachd at Oban. How can we move in small increments towards a scenario where a professional career as a big-game musician is the ultimate prize? Towards a career that allows you to pay the mortgage and support a family, i.e. ‘professional’ in the mainstream sense, rather than the piping sense (which in a good year might bring in $8,000 if you are lucky).

This vision - that competition winners can look forward to musical careers beyond the competition environment - is perhaps intimately connected with the overall aim of the Alt Pibroch Club. Currently, this is expressed on our About page as:

to expand contemporary pibroch interpretation

We have identified three goals in delivering that mission, the first of which is:

1. To provide a safe space which nurtures experimentation and the confidence to play (and to reward) alternative settings and styles, encouraging pluralism in mainstream pibroch performance.

The question is, which is the dog and which is the tail - pluralism of interpretation, or commanding a wider audience? Or are these complementary aspects of the same thing, yin and yang?

We at the Alt Pibroch Club are contemplating an expansion of the mission and goals stated on our About page by considering the ways in which we may help develop career paths that currently lie beyond pibroch players’ horizons.

This would mean focusing on audience building - possibly learning a thing or two from what symphony orchestras and opera houses do in order to build their audiences and attract funding and patronage in contemporary society.

The Alt Pibroch Club is ready to forge partnerships that can make a difference. This is as much about transforming mindsets outside piping as within piping and can’t happen overnight. Things have been moving steadily in promising directions, however, and we believe the momentum exists now to do something exciting to every piper’s benefit. This is not about changing the game. Rather, it is about removing the glass ceiling that currently prevents pibroch players from climbing higher, commanding an international career like any other musician.

Here are some ideas to get the conversations started:

1. We propose the formation of a steering group composed of experienced pipers and piping event organisers, experienced booking agents and promoters, prestigious venues, broadcasters and a recording label, in order to attract a consortium of patrons and sponsors who are excited by this idea.
2. We propose a fact-finding mission that will observe and reflect on what can be learned from big-time international competitions outside piping.
3. We propose consideration of the development of positive incentives or explicit assessment criteria to reward pipers who engage the audience and go the extra mile, rising above safe, stereotypical interpretations and repertoire. This development need not take place within the competition environment, but instead can take place within a complementary series of showcases for professional and amateur performers.
4. We propose the above-mentioned series include the public performances also include Gaelic harp, fiddle and vocal music (with supertitle translations), perhaps also traditional story-telling, in order to re-integrate piping with its rich and fascinating cultural heritage and perhaps in the process make it more digestible for the young and the uninitiated.
5. We propose exploring and understanding the requirements to host such performances at major international venues - New York, Vancouver, Sydney, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris and London.
6. We propose determining which of the legal structures out there - existing or to-be-created - would be best suited to turn this dream into reality.
7. Finally, we propose to partner with major pipe band associations and piobaireachd societies to help develop channels of professional development, including but not limited to, the recital series mentioned, in order to help elite performers break through the glass ceiling and develop rich and rewarding professional opportunities.

This is our blue-sky thinking. It is not something that can be contemplated alone! But we’re ready to be part of a bigger process and believe it is attainable and sustainable.

We wish to solicit your feedback and support.