When the thunderous skirl of the Scottish bagpipes rises in the air, it’s the rare person, Celtic or otherwise, who doesn’t look to the sound, heart racing. And there stands the piper, gazing steadily outwards, offering the music of Scotland and the Isles to all who open their spirits wide to the human stories of change, loss, and longing. The pipes can convey happiness and love, too, all range of emotions. Mastering the subtleties can take years.
Nineteen-year-old Cameron MacNeil, a Duty Piper at the Gaelic College in St. Ann’s, on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, is in for the musical long run. Now in his second year at Cape Breton University, in the community studies program, Cameron enjoys his work as an “ambassador of Scottish music and culture,” strolling the college grounds playing music and greeting visitors. But he didn’t always hold the pipes so easily.
“I was nine years old, short, and under 100 pounds (45 kilograms) when I started on the chanter, then the bagpipes,” says MacNeil, who grew up in the village of Christmas Island, Cape Breton. “The pipes are heavy, the bag and drones are five to 10 pounds (2.3 to 4.7 kilograms). It took a while to get used to. I remember spending a whole day trying to make a sound. It’s also a bit of a moving object, because you’re blowing, squeezing the bag with your arm, and finding the notes on the chanter.”
A piper eventually learns to do all this while reading music, and playing from memory, while walking alone, or marching with others.
MacNeil, now 6’2”, (2 metres) and 170 pounds (77 kilograms), is well able to blow, squeeze, find the melody, and march with the best of them. He’s also loves his instrument, preferring time-honoured Scottish music forms such as marches, dance tunes, and slow airs.
Historians say bagpipes are among the oldest instruments in the world but disagree on the place (Ancient Egypt, the Middle East, Europe, to name three) and date of origin, some claiming 1000 BCE, and others standing by a date of 1300 AD, at the earliest. Everyone agrees the pipes were used in war.
Author Tim Stewart, writes in his article, “Canadian Pipers at War, 1914-1918: An Inspired Tradition,” published in Canadian Military History, that bagpipes and the military have been linked in battle for more than 400 years. Further, he says, “Many non-Scots perhaps had some patience for pipes in peacetime, but they could see no value in the pipes during war. Their minds were changed after they witnessed the power of the bagpipes to motivate and inspire soldiers on the battlefield.”
Many generals believed the eerie, carrying sound of the pipes, audible from great distances, struck fear into the enemy’s hearts.
Bagpipes look complicated, with an assortment of pipes sticking out from a central bag, made of animal hide, sheep skin, or synthetics, covered with velvet or cord material. Although there are many varieties, all are woodwind instruments with reed pipes. Most have a bag, a blow pipe, a melody (chanter) pipe, and drone pipes, commonly three, which make a chordal hum (two tenor, one bass, an octave lower). The drone pipes offer the first rising sounds you’ll hear when a piper is readying to play. The melody, played on the chanter, comes next.
The resulting sound is big, loud, and for many, haunting and emotional.
Specialized makers enable MacNeil and other contemporary pipers to provide musical magic on their pipes. Esteemed player and luthier, John Walsh, from Antigonish, N.S., built MacNeil’s Great Highland Bagpipes, the best-known of three types of pipes native to Scotland. The Scottish Smallpipe and the Border Pipes, also known as the Lowland pipes, round out the trio.
MacNeil dresses in his family’s tartan when on duty at the Gaelic College. In 2025, he’s working eight-hour shifts, five days a week, from July to August. Being a duty piper is a part of his degree requirements. When he plays with the Cape Breton Island Pipe Band, (CBIPB) the band with which he competes, he wears his Cape Breton University tartan.
Pipe Major Trevor Kellock heads the 30-member band. Twenty-five years into playing the pipes, he credits his life in music to attending a chance practice as a teenager at the New Glasgow Legion, where he picked up a chanter, sparking an instant connection. “I learned on the piano from age four on,” says Kellock. “Later, I saw that most students were playing pipes and drums. It was the pipes that were natural to me.”
The bagpipes gave Kellock many opportunities at home and around the world. These included competing through amateur- and professional-grade solos, playing with numerous pipe bands, working as a pipe major, and in that capacity, leading bands to wins at the North American Championships (one with CBIPB). He has also performed abroad and at Nova Scotia’s famous Celtic Colours International Festival of Music. And he’s only 40 years old.
The Cape Breton Island Pipe Band is actually two separate bands that play at different levels of performance. Members range from their 20s to their 70s.
Kellock also teaches at the Cape Breton Victoria Regional Centre for Education in Sydney. “I met Cameron and his older brother Aidan in the 2000s, when they came to a program we started with the Nova Scotia Tattoo, where the kids could learn to play the pipes for free,” says Kellock. He taught the MacNeil boys, providing them with a loaner set of pipes to get started. The boys’ sister Emma and their parents, James and MaryLeigh MacNeil, all musical, supported the boys’ efforts.
Now, says Kellock, “Cameron and Aidan are dynamite players. They’re also stars in general, so involved in their communities, active at sessions, concerts, and festivals. Both of them teach and Trevor competes.”
Kellock would like to expand the love of playing the bagpipes beyond traditional circles of mostly male players who have Celtic roots.
“We’re lucky here at our school to have students from all over the world,” says Kellock. “We have students from Africa, south and east Asia, and the Philippines.”
He is also delighted to have students from near-by Membertou First Nation studying the pipes with him.
“It’s fantastic,” he says of the experience of teaching more than 100 kids a year. Girls remain in the minority, Kellock notes. It remains a challenge, he believes, because there are only few women role models for the girls to look up to.
There are five women pipers in the Cape Breton Island Pipe Band. One of them is Barbara Morrison, from Coxheath.
“I started playing in my second year of university at St. Francis Xavier,” says Morrison, now 70 and a member of the band since 2016. “What with work and life, it’s been on and off since then, but I love being in the band.”
Morrison especially loves competing with the band, which she hadn’t done before, and the parades, which she finds stirring for their walking wall of sound and the feeling of connection with her bandmates. She says she is “still learning,” but is pleased with her progress.
Kellock acknowledges Morrison’s work.
“Barb signed onto playing the pipes early on when we started offering lessons to adults. She is passionate and dedicated. She really wants to push herself to be better. She is a curious learner who asks lots of questions.”
Like many involved with Celtic music, Morrison studies Gaelic and loves to speak it. “The tunes we play in the band are tied in closely with the Gaelic culture,” she says. This includes the presence of children at musical events at St. Ann’s and community centres and other venues around Nova Scotia, another feature Morrison enjoys. “The best parts of being in the band are the laughs, learning, camaraderie, and fun.”
Cameron MacNeil agrees. “I feel a lot of pride to participate in my culture so much,” he says. “I enjoy being a duty piper, the square dances, learning new tunes, speaking Gaelic, all of it.”
Trevor Kellock sees a dynamic and evolving future ahead for the bagpipes. “At the moment, we’re running a project to teach piping to Grade 6 pupils in the Cape Breton school system. We were fortunate to receive a grant from MusiCounts (a Canadian music-education charity), which will allow us to purchase 150 practice chanters.”
The timbre of Kellock’s voice is bright. “This grant will be a game-changer. Bagpiping is alive and well in Cape Breton and Nova Scotia.”