Highland games and cultural festivals in general sit on a financial precipice. They serve an extremely narrow subset of the public in spite of every effort to make them more generally appealing. And as hard as they try, these games have an annual challenge to draw the crowds needed to sustain themselves. One or two rainy years and these games are suddenly faced with the prospect of shutting down completely. Add to this already stress-inducing burden spending money on a bagpiping competition for soloists and bands all imposed by the governing policy of the EUSPBA, and the games suddenly have one more boulder to roll uphill.
The EUSPBA is in a position to provide quite a bit more than just advice to back up the imposition it places on Highland games. Anything beyond that advice is naturally going to take the form of some sort of funding or spending. In lieu of any other brainstorming for solutions, we’ll tackle the subject here at Pipehacker with ideas that are hopefully actionable and concrete (such as Idea 1.). Here is Idea 2 for hacking bagpipe competitions: The Sanctioning Plus Grant.
Sanctioning Plus
One of the clear byproducts of the EUSPBA bagpipe competition “system,” if you will, is that bagpipers, drummers, and pipe bands can expect that every event that they attend in the eastern circuit will be exactly the same. This applies whether the games are large, small, medium, clustered together, or spread thither and yon. The fact that all games can obtain the same sanctioning from the EUSPBA and have their event count the same way as any other is viewed as a strength of the system by many. But the system has a weakness.
The weakness is, well, that all games can obtain the same sanctioning from the EUSPBA and have their event count the same way as any other. Read More
Insert the word “bagpipes” for “Lexus” and you are witnessing the future of Highland bagpipe construction. It is the ultimate pipehack: To make a set of bagpipes woven of carbon fiber.
Subscribe to the PIPEHACKER RSS feed.
Pipehacker