Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD The TerMInOlOgy OF IrISh BellOWS-BlOWn BAgPIPeS 50
likely to have been part of his own promotion. 154 The Scottish bagpipes
in question are undoubtedly to be understood as the mouthblown
highland bagpipes, and the Irish bagpipes as the
bellows-blown instrument, both, as seen, recently known in
contemporary london. Although Scottish and Irish bagpipes had long
existed in both mouth- and bellows-blown forms, this fact was unknown
or ignored by writers (as distinct from artists) in contemporary
england. A plethora of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century statements
in print there conveys this over-simple dichotomy of Scottish bagpipes
being mouth-blown and Irish bellows-blown. 155 What elements
of each bagpipe are being united? In organological terms, this explanation
does not make sense. The Scottish pipes and Irish pipes, as we
know them from documentary evidence and surviving sets, are each
separate linear descendants of earlier Scottish and Irish pipes respectively,
and each exhibit only separately localised forms of the elements
of their continental ancestors. each type of bagpipe had
154
As has been seen, Courtney’s 1793 Dublin management often advertised his
instrument as ‘bagpipes’ but he himself, personally seeking engagements, refers
to them as ‘union pipes’.
155
See for example Pennant 1772: 178: ‘Bag-pipes... The oldest are played with
the mouth, the loudest and most ear-piercing of any wind musick; the other,
played with the fingers only, are of Irish origin...’; and Jones 1794: 116: ‘we
have reason to believe that the Britons blew it [the Bagpipes] with the mouth,
instead of the bellows, like the Irish pipes’. This perceived distinction between
the two kinds of bagpipes is also reflected in the advertisements of those english
musical-instrument sellers of the second half of the eighteenth century who
advertise ‘Bagpipes, Scotch and Irish’ (see note 40 above), and must have been
supported by the contemporary exploits of highland pipers in the British army.
Queen Victoria much later made the same distinction, and preferred the Scottish:
‘Friday August 10 [1849]... The Irish pipe is very different from the Scotch; it
is very weak and they don’t blow into it, but merely have a small bellows which
they move with the arm. – Queen Victoria, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life,
london, 1868: 184, quoted in An Píobaire vol. 3, no 7 (July 1991, contributed
by Seán Donnelly). The more significant difference at any rate is the extended
musical range of the Irish chanter rather than its air source.