Great Scott! College of Piping releases tribute CD The Guardian

Doug Hall, left, and Gordon Belsher display Great Scott, a CD which will be launched tonight in honour of the late Scott MacAulay, former director and CEO of the College of Piping. Guardian photo

The death of renowned piper and music educator Scott MacAulay in September of last year left members of the Celtic music community and many others with a tremendous sense of loss.
As director and CEO of the College of Piping & Celtic Performing Arts in Summerside, a position he’d held since the college’s inception in 1990, MacAulay had nurtured a love of Highland bagpiping, Scottish-style drumming and Highland dancing in thousands of students from around the world.
Among those to feel a deep sense of loss at MacAulay’s passing was close friend Doug Hall.
Hall, a successful businessman who first became associated with the college as a student and went on, along with his wife Debbie, to become donors and patrons of the facility, decided late last year he wanted to do something special in MacAulay’s honour.
After mulling things over in his mind for a while it occurred to him that one of the most fitting ways to celebrate MacAulay’s life and accomplishments would be to produce a CD of the music he so loved.
That idea has now born fruit.
The college MacAulay helped build into one of the finest schools of its kind in the world has just released a special two-CD set featuring over 90 minutes of music recorded by MacAulay and many of the musicians and singers with whom he shared his passion for Celtic culture.
Great Scott!: 100 % Authentic, Heartfelt Celtic, will be officially launched at the College of Piping tonight during a brief ceremony before the start of the college’s new summer production, Highland Storm the Gael.
And the first 100 people who go to the College of Piping today, Wednesday and Thursday and buy at least two tickets for Highland Storm the Gael will be given a free copy of the new CD.
Hall picked up the entire cost of the CD so that 100 per cent of the money raised through the sale of the CD can be donated to the college’s scholarship program.
That program enables any person in P.E.I. between the ages of eight and 18 who wants to take lessons in highland pipes and/or highland drums to take lessons at the college for free. Those lessons are offered in both Charlottetown and Summerside.
Great Scott!: 100 % Authentic, Heartfelt Celtic is divided into two distinct parts.
Disc one features a previously unreleased recording of solo pipe pieces by MacAulay made in 1997.
The second disc features recordings made over a period of years by MacAulay in company with a host of other artists.
Those performing with MacAulay include keyboard player Troy MacGillivray, percussionist Brad Fremlin, guitarists Kim Vincent, Elmer Deagle and Gordon Belsher, cellist Rick Tersteeg, piper Iain Speirs and several vocalists, most notably Michael Burgess and Patricia Murray.
The search for material for the CDs began in MacAulay’s old office.
“We were stirring around in his office and there were a whole lot of recordings he’d done over the years. He was a pack rat, he had unbelievable amounts of stuff so it took some time to go through that. There were records up on the wall. We took them down, and had a studio in Cincinnati clean them up and transfer them to disc. Cassettes too.”
Hall then placed a call to musician/record producer Gordon Belsher who’d been recording material for MacAulay since 1992.
Belsher advised Hall that MacAulay had recorded a solo CD but never released it.
That recording, which Belsher believes was made sometime in 1997, features close to a dozen medleys of slow airs, marches, jigs, reels, Strathspeys and hornpipes and a single piobaireachd.
“It was supposed to have been part of a collection called The World’s Greatest Pipers,” Belcher said. “For whatever reason, it was never released.
“Every year I’d ask Scott ‘when are you going to release your solo album, it’s a great album.’ But it never was released. So when this idea came up I thought this would be a great time to do it.”
Hall said a number of things make MacAulay’s solo recording special.
“Not only did Scott record it but he was persnickety on the editing of it  and the mastering of it and putting things together.”
MacAulay was a brilliant piper but he was a lot more than that, Hall maintains.
“He was also a composer and the bands he worked with were so important to him so we decided to put together two CDs instead of one,” Hall said. “One was the original, the solo CD, the second is a real celebration, featuring a lot of different artists.”
Choosing the material for the second CD was challenging because there was so much to choose from.
It was also challenging because of Scott’s feelings towards certain types or pieces of music.
But in the end they came up with a selection of material they felt captured the essence of MacAulay.
“It’s also really a litany of the college,” Hall said.
He said one of the things he likes about the CD is the way Belsher edited it.
“He left the heads and tails on a lot of these pieces. Normally you get just the music, but here you’ve go Scott giving an explanation of canttaireachd, how it goes, and then you go to the piece from Ancestral Voices of them doing it so you get a sense of the history of the college. It brings alive the essence of what the college is about.”