Class of 2018: Lifelong love of bagpipes sets the tone for UCalgary convocation

Every year, Alf Miller picks a different Scottish march to play on his Great Highland Bagpipes as he leads the procession into convocation — the official beginning of the ceremony. Miller has marched more than a few miles through the Jack Simpson Gym wearing his kilt of University of Calgary tartan — he’s piped in pretty much every single ceremony since 2006. “Every convocation I try to change it up,” he says. “I pipe tunes that are musical and fit the occasion.”

Over the years, Miller has played marching tunes that date back hundreds of years to bloody battles between the Scots and the English, others that celebrate the flavour of fine whisky, to more contemporary marching tunes. “This year I am playing a relatively new tune called At Long Last, which I think is very appropriate for convocations,” he says.

“It was written by a Canadian, James MacHattie.” MacHattie wrote the march about setting and achieving goals with hard work and determination in 2004, and Miller has it committed to memory, along with scores of other marches.

“You only play what you know because pipers don’t carry a sheet of music in front of them, it’s all in the head,” says the piper. “There are thousands of great Scottish tunes for marching, and I’ll practise whatever I decide to play.” Miller times the music to the march so that he finishes playing as the procession gets on stage and seated — which can be a little tricky.

Piper Alf Miller, right, with mace-bearer Gavin Peat.

Clayton MacGillivray, Werklund School of Education

“You have to stay focused. Some tunes you don’t really have to think too hard, other tunes you have to concentrate a little bit more on how far you have to go,” he says. “You have to make sure that you are going to cut off the tune as the platform party has all got into their seats, so you have to judge that and adjust your pace a little.”

That’s old hat for Miller. He started playing the pipes in 1955, when he was 13, and has played in about a dozen pipe bands from Saskatchewan to B.C., with a stop in Ottawa. Miller and his wife moved to Calgary in 2003, and he was part of the UCalgary Pipe Band until it folded in 2005.

“Bagpipes have taken me a lot of places” and delivered a lot of firsts, he says. “First time in an airplane, first time in a limousine, first time in an elevator, first time I smelled salt air …” And after being part of a Calgary Highlander’s battlefield tour in 2015, Miller’s pipes brought him another first, meeting the Queen at Canada House in London. 

In 2017, he was the first to play the lament at the dedication ceremony of the Hill 70 Monument in France, and he’s had the honour of playing in The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo on two separate occasions.

Miller has loved the pipes since he was “in the cradle” in Saskatchewan. “The next-door neighbour played the pipes and my mother said I always enjoyed it when he was outside playing his pipes.” And as for those who may disparage the high-pitch sound of the bagpipes, he just lets that sort of thing roll off his back.

“Maybe they just haven’t heard a good set of pipes,” Miller says with a smile.