Antwerp & District Pipe Band
Belgian pipe band
The Antwerp & District Pipe Band is Belgium's leading pipe band, it's also the first ever grade two band in Belgium which it became after becoming second at the British Championships in Annan.
History
The Antwerp & District Pipe Band is Belgium's leading pipe band. The band was founded in 1978, when a group of enthousistic musicians wanted to achieve a higher musical level and left the Red Hackle Pipe Band Belgium to start a competition-oriented band.
In the first years of its existence the band was led by pipe major Ludo Thijssen and leading drummer Peter Vandeperre. In 1980, only two years after the foundation, the first successes came with a 4th place at one of the world's biggest pipe band championships, the Cowal Highland Gathering. As a result, the band was promoted to grade 3. In the next thirty years, the band played at a top grade 3 level.
In 1988, the band started competing with two bands (a grade 3 and a grade 4 band), to improve the musical level. Andrew Tierney led the B-band to the top of grade 4 (Nowadays it is known as the Belgian Blend Pipe Band, and was recently promoted to grade 3b). In 1990, Andrew took over from Ludo Thijssen and became pipe major of the Antwerp & District Pipe Band until 2002, leaving the band in the hands of Thomas Kerkhof.
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This entry incorporates text from “Antwerp & District Pipe Band” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.