Piping Off:
The Story of Austin's Flourishing Bagpipe Scene
By Graham Dickie, Lucas Lostoski, and Jenah Ovalles-Forey
The sprawling campus of St. Stephen’s Episcopal School is very dark tonight. There’s only the occasional street lamp and the stars to light the way up the hilly terrain.
It’s quiet here. The kids are out for Thanksgiving Break. The only sounds that can be heard are the rustle of leaves in the crisp November wind, and the unmistakable drone of bagpipes resounding through the air.
This relatively secluded portion of Austin, Texas about 30 minutes west from downtown is a long way from Scotland. But it’s here every week where Austin’s premiere competitive bagpiping band—Silver Thistle Pipes and Drums—gathers for practice and instruction.
“To have good pipe music you need to play in unison,” Silver Thistle pipe major Doug Slauson said. “You want all the pipes to sort of blend together and sound like one large bagpipe while the drums provide the musical contrast.”
Hundreds of people lined the sidewalks of Congress Avenue on the Saturday after Thanksgiving for the annual Chuy’s Children Giving to Children Parade. Per tradition, a small troupe of bagpipers led the parade, and you could hear the notoriously loud instrument resonate for blocks around downtown Austin.
But while many Austinites may encounter the bagpipes at events like this, few know any background about the world beneath the surface of parades, funerals, and the occasional public concert -- like the hours dedicated pipers spend practicing during the night on hilltops outside of the city, the competitions the bands attend all over the southern United States, and the deep connection with police and fire stations around the city.
Here’s an account of different aspects of bagpiping in Austin. When asked about previous efforts to tell the story of Austin's bagpipers, Ken Liechte an engineering professor at the University of Texas and something of an elder statesman in the Austin bagpiping scene, replied: “I think you’re in virgin territory.”
At a windswept cemetery in Burnet, Austin Fire Department lieutenant and bagpiping enthusiast Andre de la Reza is pacing back and forth among tombstones while he rehearses a quick medley on a set of pipes. He waits for the hearse to come rolling in.
His uniform this afternoon is part on-duty firefighter, part-Scottish highland piper: heavy-duty black boots; a green checkered kilt; a sporran, or small pouch worn like a fanny pack; and a button-up shirt adorned with his fire department badges. He tops it off with a stylish Balmoral, a beret-like cap from Scotland.
The funeral today is for a fellow firefighter. Emergency service workers have famously grueling schedules, but de la Reza has nonetheless used one of his days off to make the hour-long trek in support of the family.
As a firefighter and dedicated bagpiper, de la Reza is not an anomaly. The organization he leads, Espada, draws on public safety individuals across Texas to build a loose band that performs at numerous parades, public events, and funerals like this one every year, forming an extensive network of emergency service pipers in Texas. The organization currently has over 30 players.
Kirby, however, started so he could throw his parents off.
“I began playing when I was nine because my parents wanted me to do an extracurricular activity,” Kirby says. “As a kid I mainly just liked playing video games all day so I didn’t want to do an extracurricular activity. So I thought I would trick them by picking something obscure like bagpiping. I thought they would never be able to find a bagpiping teacher in Austin.”
Three weeks later they did.
By the time he was 12, Kirby was excelling in the bagpipes and began participating in the Silver Thistle’s very first youth practices held by Ken Liechti, the University of Texas engineering professor and former Pipe Major of the Silver Thistle band.
Liechti is a sort-of godfather to the Austin bagpiping community. Born and raised in central Scotland, Liechti began playing the pipes when he was 10 and carried it with him to US.
“I developed a talent and played in the school band right until I left at 18 years old,” Liechti says. “I also played in a civilian band outside of school which competed in the Highland Games. It ended up being a Grade One band during the time I was there.”
Grade One refers to the scale by which pipe bands are judged at competitions -- kind of like how NCAA football teams are divided into A, AA, and so on. The best bands are Grade One, while the lowest level bands are ranked as Grade Five.
To have played for a Grade One band is a huge deal in Texas. Having competed for years in the Eastern United States Pipe Band Association conference, Silver Thistle is the only band in Texas ranked at Grade Three.
A lot of the Thistle’s success has to do with Liechti, who led the group for 26 years before stepping down in 2011.
“When I came, Silver Thistle were competing and we would not practice very hard, and there would tend to be a rush of activity a couple months prior to contest,” he says. “When I came I organized things on a much more rigorous scale. We had weekly practices, we had the same uniform. We started to look like a band.”
Today, Silver Thistle travels as far as Scotland to compete and provides training for new players like Fitzgibbon and Chuter. Throughout the course of the year they attend many more competitions within the United States including ones in Stone Mountain, Georgia and Salado, Texas. Despite living in a state that Sean describes as a “bagpiping desert” -- and a city where you can’t buy a bagpipe from any brick-and-mortar store -- Silver Thistle is determined to compete with the best.
This has made them the premiere competition pipe band in Austin. However, they are not the only (or even the oldest) pipe band in Austin.
The Instrument of Public Safety
Davis thinks it’s especially important to be proficient because his Georgetown band effectively functions as a public relations vessel for the department.
“We represent this department and every person in it,” Davis said. “We have an obligation to spend the time practicing.”
The need to perform well also stems from a desire to give proper send-offs to their fallen comrades, Espada members said. Bagpipes have become integral parts of funerals for firefighters and police, and Espada always tries to send at least one piper to funerals across the state.
“If that would ever be me going into the ground… I think about how I would want my fellow pipers -- my fellow firefighters -- to play and how I would want my ceremony to sound,” de la Reza said.
While they stressed that there is nothing naturally sad about the pipes, funerals bring out the deep sadness that the instrument is capable of oozing through “slow aires” -- more drawn out, plaintive tunes. Funerals also present a unique performance setting. Few other instruments brush up so closely with death, and the pipes add an elegiac feeling to the events.
“When it’s time to play I kind of go into a zone,” Bircher said about playing at funerals on behalf of Espada. “I have to control my emotions so that I play that tune well. Sometimes with the band, particularly right before we play at funerals for the fallen, you'll hear their children crying or the loved ones crying. I have to grab their attention really quick and say ‘look at me’. It's a discipline not to allow those emotions to take over when you're playing.”
After the funeral in Burnet, several members of the family approach de la Reza to thank him. He works his way past the fire engines that have assembled per tradition and hangs up his uniform in the back of the car.
“We've been called to play for people who I've known,” he says as he drives out of the gates. “Being a public safety individual, you've learned to compartmentalize things. You deal with the problem at hand. My idea is you want to accentuate and support the event and not draw attention. It's not about us.”
Willy Chuter receives bagpipe lessons from Doug Slauson, the pipe major of Silver Thistle, on November 30 at St. Stephen's Episcopal School. Chuter is playing the chanter. Most bagpipe players start on the chanter and then upgrade to the full-set of pipes after many months of practice. Photo by Graham Dickie.
Andre de la Reza plays the bagpipes at a funeral for a retired firefighter on November 17 in Burnet, Texas. A lieutenant in the Austin Fire Department, de la Reza is also the president of Espada, an organization uniting bagpipers in the emergency services across Texas. Photo by Graham Dickie.
Kirby nods. Most pipers have similar stories to Toni explaining how they began playing. They saw a neighbor or a friend perform, or maybe they took a Scottish vacation. Most people don’t randomly decide to play the bagpipes.
Willie Chuter, a middle school-aged kid learning to play the pipes with Silver Thistle, said he wanted to be different and learn something he could play to “impress his friends because they didn’t know how to.”
“They just go like, ‘How do you play that? How did you find how to do that?” Chuter said. “They’re just amazed.”
This belief that the blending of a few into one produces the most harmonious results is a theory endorsed by pipe majors and Christians alike. So it seems only fitting that the bagpipe-version of “Amazing Grace” is bellowing from this courtyard sitting only a few hundred feet from St. Stephen’s Church.
Inside the school several of the band’s members hold private lessons.
One of the teachers is Sean Kirby, a 27-year-old who introduces himself as “the second oldest guy in the band.” His easy-going demeanor reflects in his choice of dress. He’s wearing blue jeans and a yellow T-shirt that says “Teamwork Makes the Dream Work” as he conducts a practice with a middle-aged woman named Toni Fitzgibbon.
Learning how to play the bagpipes is an arduous process. You don’t get a set of pipes to start. Instead you start on a slender woodwind called a chanter, which resembles a musical recorder.
According to Kirby, the average student will take 18 to 24 months before they receive their full set of pipes. You need dedication.
Fitzgibbon is a beginner and tells Kirby that a parade led by the Georgetown Fire Department Pipes and Drums band inspired her to learn how to play.
“I was standing there next to my Scottish husband and I told him ‘I want to learn the bagpipes,’” she says.
Austin’s oldest piping band also is its least competitive.
“We are definitely the laid-back street band pipe band,” Capitol City Highlanders Pipe Major Shawn Levsen said. “Anyone that wants to play can play.”
The Highlanders meet every Monday night near Burnet Road at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection in order to practice and provide affordable lessons for anyone interested.
Started in 1980, the band has found its niche in the Austin piping community, which has grown considerably in the past 36 years.
“People like alternative music in Austin,” Levsen said. “I think there is more interest in the pipes in Austin because it is outside of the mainstream culture here.”
The band enjoys playing gigs year-round and played seven shows on St. Patrick’s Day last year.
“Yeah, on St. Patrick’s Day we just hopped around from bar to bar and played,” Levsen said. “St. Patrick’s is like Christmas for a piping band.”
Levsen says that his band will swell from five to as many as 15 members depending on the time of the year. He keeps his band busy by playing a wide variety of shows from weddings to funerals to birthday parties and parades.
“The great thing about the bagpipes is that it’s just some guy playing in a skirt and people love it,” Levsen says before he pauses to correct himself. “Well, people love it for twenty minutes before they get tired of it.”
It’s a perfect response from a guy leading the laid-back street band.
He knows that to a lot of people the bagpipes are simply a novelty; a kind of cool sounding instrument that is played at the local parade.
But to many others here in Austin it is their year-long passion that takes them around the globe.
And for some it is the tool they use to help grieve their friends who have departed from this world.
Although the Great Highland bagpipe -- used by many players in Austin -- is far and away the most visible kind of bagpipe for non-initiates, there are many regional variants of the bagpipe played around the world. (In fact, it is widely held that the pipes were invented outside of Scotland -- the Middle East is more likely.) Here is a collection of found footage showcasing the pipes in eight different countries.
More Information:
Graphic by: Jenah Ovalles-Forey, courtesy of each band's website or Facebook page.
The Academy on a Hill
Bagpipes have long been a strong presence in fire and police departments across the country. Facing widespread discrimination, Scottish and Irish immigrants arriving to the United States in the mid-1800s often took undesirable public safety jobs, and they helped meld their native bagpipes into the professions. The connection stuck and members of Espada say the two make even more sense together now.
“It’s a very loud -- some may call it obnoxious -- instrument, but I prefer to think of it as a very majestic instrument,” Espada pipe major and retired Austin police officer Todd Bircher said. “Therefore it’s fitting for [public safety jobs].”
Today, public safety bands constitute a significant portion of the national bagpiping landscape, and certainly the Austin one.
“I probably had 20 people in my department try to play the chanter at one time or another,” Georgetown Fire Department Pipes and Drums pipe major Jeff Davis said. “Firefighters and cops pick it up real fast.”
As the first organization of its kind in Texas, Espada is an attempt to formalize this connection between public safety and bagpipes, using the pipes as a bridge to communities across the state and a way to strengthen tradition within departments.
Although scheduling is hard, Espada gets together once a month in Austin for an eight-hour practice. People drive in from all over. While compared to Silver Thistle -- what they call a “civilian band” -- Espada members have little time to perfect their tunes, they are dedicated to maintaining high standards, and the group has twice won a national competition among public safety bands in Washington D.C.
“Sometimes emergency service bands rest on their laurels and only play ‘Amazing Grace,” Bircher said. “My goal was to not only play officer's and firefighter’s funerals, but to play very well.”