Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD The TerMInOlOgy OF IrISh BellOWS-BlOWn BAgPIPeS 4
forms of bellows pipes appear to have been in existence by the late
seventeenth century, 6 and to have been subject to processes of development
that continued through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth
centuries. Distinct traditions of bellows-pipes manufacture and playing
would survive in Scotland, northern england, and Ireland after bagpipes
had fallen out of favour in most of Britain. no early insular
makers are known, but the attachment of bellows to existing types of
bagpipes, or the importation of a small number of Continental bellows
pipes, probably of different kinds, would have been sufficient to set
chain reactions in motion among innovative makers. Bellows pipes
would always be peripheral instruments in these islands, and would
never be played in any great numbers. They would never begin to rival
the recorder, violin, german flute or keyboard instruments in popularity,
and the major music publishers of Britain and Ireland would not
publish music or tutors for them as they would for those instruments.
But bellows pipes have often been accorded an elite status, specialist
publishers have long produced tutors and tune books for them, and
they have exerted a persistent, powerful and unique fascination on
6
For Britain there is the evidence of the english playwright Thomas Shadwell who
in his 1671 play The Humorists refers to ‘a Scotch-Bag-Pipe that has got a flaw
in the Bellows’ (quoted in Stewart 2009: 53; from Keith Sanger) and that of the
english organologist James Talbot who c. 1685–1700 listed ‘Scotch’ bellows
bagpipes which he had seen (Cocks 1952: 44–5). In both instances ‘Scotch’ may
mean ‘north British’. By the 1720s there is further evidence of various kinds of
Scottish and northern english bellows pipes (Sanger 1989: 11–13). The Irish
evidence is less explicit, not mentioning bellows until the 1750s, but there are
references from the 1680s to bagpipes being played in domestic settings with
harp and fiddle and these must have been pipes of the new kind (Carolan 2010:
6–7). larry neal M’elvanna, an ‘Irish piper of note’ who died in Co Down in
1746 in his 78th year, was reported as having learned to play the pipes from Piper
Malone of lurgan, ‘who died in 1700 at the advanced age of 100’ (Walker’s
Courant, Sept. 1746, quoted in An Píobaire vol. 3, no 35, Apr. 1998: 23). By
1746 a noted Irish piper was doubtless a bellows piper.