Peter Liu of Nashville awarded the fourth Jimmy McIntosh Piobaireachd Scholarship

After reviewing the applications from several pipers, the Jimmy McIntosh Piobaireachd Scholarship committee settled on Peter Lui of Nashville as the recipient of the prestigious award to assist him in the study of piobaireachd in “the Balmoral tradition.”

Lui will begin his instruction later in June in Pittsburgh with a weekend session taught by Mike Cusack, one of McIntosh’s most successful pupils and the most successful American solo piping competitor in history.

For the rest of the year and into 2026, Lui will receive private tuition from Cusack, Andrew Carlisle, Amy Garson, Nick Hudson, and Mike Rogers, all of whom had extensive tuition from McIntosh, and then biweekly lessons in canntaireachd from Nancy Tunnicliff for the rest of 2025. The scholarship concludes with a piobaireachd workshop with Cusack, Hudson and Carlisle at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in February 2026, where Lui will perform a recital that will include piobaireachds has learned in 2025.

“All the pipers who applied demonstrated a great deal of promise, and the committee’s decision was difficult,” the scholarship committee said in a statement. “We are confident that Peter will work hard and reap tremendous benefits from the piobaireachd instruction to be provided by our excellent panel of instructors in the coming months.”

In the early 1990s, McIntosh worked with Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to establish its first bachelor’s degree in piping, at the time the only degree course of its kind in the world. He and his wife, Joyce (nee MacFarlane) – a very accomplished piper whom he met at one of his piping schools – moved to Pittsburgh, where they would stay for many years with McIntosh, a professor of music at Carnegie Mellon. After he retired and gave way to his successor, Alasdair Gillies, the McIntoshes would move to South Carolina in the 2000s.

In 1994, McIntosh was awarded the MBE for services to piping. He travelled to Buckingham Palace to accept the award from Queen Elizabeth II. He died in February 2021 at the age of 95.

Jimmy McIntosh’s contributions to piping, particularly in the eastern United States, were immense. His passion for imparting his knowledge was inexhaustible. Among his other prominent pupils were Bruce Gandy, Alasdair Gillies, Peter Kent, Scott MacAulay, Alex McIntyre and Tom Speirs.