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The young Kintyre piper Lorne MacDougall, who unveils this year's second New Voices commission at Celtic Connections next Sunday, is a man on a mission.
"The conventional wisdom about bagpipes is that they can only be played loud, they can only play in B flat, and they've only got nine notes," he says. "That's always really frustrated me, and made me want to prove how much more there is to them - which is how I've ended up with the career I have, the style I have, and is also essentially where this new music came from. I'm trying to push the pipes in as many different ways as possible, to show what they're really capable of."
Not that MacDougall disavows the rigorous discipline of piping's more regimented dimensions: his own boldly innovative approach rests on those same cast-iron technical foundations,...