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MADISON PIPES & DRUMS BY KYLE JACOBSON
Have you ever heard the bleating skirl of Great Highland bagpipes and thought about your love for Jamaica? No? What about Paris? Madison? In fairness, if you answered yes to any of these, you might need to get out more or maybe watch Highlander. Or you might be familiar with Madison Pipes & Drums, but, I mean, come on, Scotland—right? Ignoring that the origin of using a bag to push air through a reed to make music might go back as far as ancient Greece, few instruments capture a sense of place as well as the bagpipes.
Bruce Gandy, contemporary pipe players and composers. “There’s a lot of modern composing going on for bagpipes,” says David Bradley, Madison Pipes & Drums president.
Meat Loaf, AC/DC, and Dropkick Murphys have all embraced the sound of the pipes for at least one song, and then there’s the likes of Ross Ainslie and
Now some packs of pipers might be content playing together just for the sake of enjoying a shared passion, but Madison Pipes & Drums takes it a step
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Which reminds me that this isn’t an article on the bagpipes. But it kind of is. Madison Pipes & Drums officially became a thing in 2002 when it split off Badger Pipes and Drums, which became a thing in 1997 when a bunch of pipers at Zor Shrine wanted to form a group that wasn’t limited to freemasons.
further with parades and competitions. Maybe you’ve seen them at Stoughton’s Syttende Mai festival, matching kilts, socks, headgear, and all. But it didn’t start that way. David says, “Our first parade that we played as a band, the only thing that matched on us was our neckties. ... The second year, we all had matching sweaters and neckties. It was many years later that we could actually afford kilts that all match each other.” Those matching uniforms certainly make them braw- and bonnie-proper in competitions, but looking the part doesn’t score marks. There, the drummers and pipers have to show their beating and bellowing amounts to something worth echoing across the
