Champion of Champions Leads the Glengarry Highland Games Massed Bands
In a few weeks on August 1 and 2, the town of Maxville will be filled with thousands of people heading to the Glengarry Highland Games for another exciting edition of one of the biggest and best celtic festivals in North America.
For many of these visitors, the main attraction will be the massed pipe bands performance on Saturday evening when more than one thousand pipers and drummers march across the field playing everyone’s favourite Scottish tunes.
Every year at the front of the massed bands is the colourful drum major who directs the scores of bands with shouted commands and signalling with a mace. All eyes of the musicians follow the mace to keep tempo and to know when to start, when to turn and when to stop playing. This critical job is key to the success of the most stirring spectacle of the Games.
This year, there will be a World Champion Drum Major leading the fifty-three bands performing at the massed bands. The Glengarry Highland Games is honoured to welcome Emma Barr as our Guest Drum Major. A two-time World Champion and All-Ireland Champion, Emma is the current Royal Scottish Pipe Band Association Champion of Champions and is the Drum Major of the 13-time World Pipe Band Champions, Field Marshall Montgomery Pipe Band. Her spectacular drum major skills and flourishing of the mace will be on full display throughout the Games, including performances Thursday at the Tartan Ball, on Friday afternoon in Circle One, at the Friday night Tattoo, and then, on Saturday in the Massed Bands.
As well, Emma will be conducting a drum major workshop on Friday, August 1st from 9:00 - 11:30 am. The workshop sessions will focus on marching, drill, flourishing, uniform discipline and musicality.
Emma Barr is from Ballygowan, Northern Ireland and was the youngest world champion drum major. She started her drum major skills at just four years old and entered her first competition at five. Since then, she has won innumerable world championships and awards and has showcased her talents across the globe, from Disneyland Paris to Her Majesty’s Theatre in London’s West End, as well as international tattoos in Germany, Switzerland, and Belfast, and now here at the Glengarry Highland Games.
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