Master Warrant Officer Emily M. Kenny, CD grew up in Winnipeg where she began piano lessons as a youngster. She transferred her musical interest to the trumpet at the age of 12, eventually joining The Royal Winnipeg Rifles as a trumpet player in 2000. Shortly afterwards she was handed a bugle and told that this was part of the tradition of The Winnipeg Rifles and was advised to learn to play it well, advice she enthusiastically followed.

In 2003, as a bugler, she was a member of a combined Royal Winnipeg Rifles/Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada Band formed to play at the opening of the Juno Beach Centre and again in 2004 at the 60th anniversary of D-Day and in 2005 for the 60th anniversary of VE-Day. During those years she also had the honour of sounding Last Post and Reveille at numerous military funerals, including those of several Canadian soldiers who lost their lives in Afghanistan. In 2010, during the regiment’s 150th anniversary, she sounded those bugle calls at a Queen’s Own Rifles wreath-laying ceremony at the National War Memorial in Ottawa where members of the regiment stood guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Bugle Major Kenny completed studies in Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba then moved to Toronto in 2006 to pursue a career in Dental Technology. In keeping with Rifles traditions, she transferred to The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, where she found knowledge of military bugle marches and calls was useful in a regiment as strong in bugle traditions as the one where she had first served.

She was appointed Bugle Major in 2013, serving until 2017 when she returned to Winnipeg and rejoined the Royal Winnipeg Rifles as Band Sergeant Major.