Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

11
InTrODUCTIOn OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
of a threatening Continental religion, and they spoke a barbarous tongue,
Irish. The country had long been colonised and ruled by Britain but never
completely subdued. Agrarian disturbances were widespread there in the
1780s, and even the Protestant ascendancy of its Dublin-based colonial
parliament was showing disquieting signs of legislative independence
during the decade. Those of its aristocrats who lived in london were
largely absentee landlords of British origins, unsympathetic to Irish indigenous
culture, and while they formed dining clubs in the city there is
no evidence that they offered patronage to Irish musicians. Most of the
city’s Irish population belonged to its often troublesome underclass.
For these and other reasons, Irish music is poorly represented in london
publications and in public performance before Courtney’s time. no
separate collection of Irish music had been published there, and when
Irish melodies are published in london from the mid-seventeenth century
they appear as stray items in anthologies or as afterthoughts in collections
of ‘english, Scottish and Irish’ tunes. The few ‘Irish’ songs known are
mainly comic stage pieces put into the mouths of Irish servants; few of
the many Irish actors in london specialised in Irish song. As the British
music historian Sir John hawkins said in about 1785: ‘I know of no Irish
airs so much celebrated in england as the Scotch have been’. 24
This situation began to change in london in the 1780s: the Dublin
dramatist John O’Keefe introduced harp tunes by the famous Irish
be seen below, some of the Society’s prizewinners were briefly introduced to
the london stage in later 1788 and in 1791. The Society itself sometimes
engaged Irish bellows pipers, including Murphy, Courtney, McDonnell and
O’Farrell mentioned below, to play at their social occasions in london, and also
(along with Murphy) a ‘piper – Allan’ who may have been the famous
northumbrian piper James Allan (see Sanger 2011: 21 and nlS MS highland
Society of london Dep. 268/34 from which a facsimile of extracts was supplied
to the writer courtesy of Keith Sanger).
24
letter to Joseph Cooper Walker quoted in Walker 1786: 66. hawkins excepted only ‘The
Black Joke’, correctly regarding this as being an Irish tune of modern composition.