Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

5
COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD The TerMInOlOgy OF IrISh BellOWS-BlOWn BAgPIPeS
players and listeners here for over three centuries now. They currently
enjoy an unprecedented worldwide level of popularity.
There is no reason to think that the different insular bellows-pipes traditions
did not arise independently of one other, nor is there any evidence that they
had an early influence on one other. But in 1743 the first english-language
publication on the bellows pipe – The Compleat Tutor for the Pastoral or
New Bagpipe – alludes to the existence of several contemporary makers of
a developing bellows bagpipe. 7 The instrument was sold in his music shop
by John Simpson, the london publisher of the Tutor, and is described in the
Tutor by its Irish author John geoghegan; but it is not known whether the
makers referred to were British or Irish. geoghegan’s tutor is for a twooctave-plus
chromatic bellows pipe with a lowest chanter note of middle C,
the second octave achieved by over-blowing (exerting increased air-pressure
on the chanter reed by squeezing the bag harder). It is not at all certain that
the instrument described by geoghegan is a brand new one, in spite of his
title; possibly he had only coined a new marketing term for an established
bellows bagpipe. 8 his book would be obscurely republished and sold into
the early nineteenth century in england and Scotland, and possibly sold in
Ireland 9 and the United States 10 – an indication of the continuing if low-level
popularity of the instrument itself, which is now well represented in museum
collections. The instrument must have had a general influence on the course
of bellows-pipe development in both Britain and Ireland.
7
‘This day is publish’d The Complete Tutor for the Pastoral or new Bagpipe... by
Mr. John geoghegan...’, Daily Advertiser, london, 29 Sept. 1743 ff. See also
Donnelly 2008a: 26–7 for the assignment of this publication to 1743.
8
The instrument illustrated in the Tutor closely resembles one illustrated in a
london publication of 1728 (see note 14 below).
9
Dennis Connor, a musical-instrument maker and seller of little Christ-Church
yard, Dublin, is advertising either ‘bagpipes’ or a tutor for the bagpipes (the
wording is ambiguous) in 1759 (Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, Dublin, 17–21 July
1759, see Carolan 2006: 23).
10
An anonymous tutor for bagpipes is advertised in Philadelphia in Stephen’s
Catalogue of Books etc. for 1795.