Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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7 InTrODUCTIOn OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ ‘Mr. Courtenay’ was the stage name of the professional bellows piper Denis Courtney, an ‘itinerant Irish musician of great fame in the British provinces’. 12 he was about twenty-eight when he made his first london concert appearance on 14 May 1788, in the company of other very different but well known performers and in what was a leading london music venue. Courtney’s piping quickly became famous in london and he had a somewhat meteoric career before he died there in 1794, in his mid-thirties, of an illness brought on by heavy drinking. long after his death, he was remembered as an outstanding musician. Before Courtney’s debut, no bagpiper of any kind is known to have given a stage recital in london, as distinct from performances in the street and in taverns and ballrooms, from the accompanying of dancers on stage, and from private recitals. Bagpipes had long been generally spoken of in print in Britain, usually in unflattering terms, and in their Scottish forms used to make oblique criticisms of Scottish politicians at Westminster. They were bywords for riot, 13 drunkenness, low living and noise. nor were Irish pipes exempt from this latter criticism. The Scottish novelist Tobias Smollet compared the piercing singing of a character in his 1751 london novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle to ‘the joint issue of an Irish bag-pipe and a sow gelder’s horn’; this quip was reproduced over and over in contemporary newspapers and magazines. nevertheless there is occasional print evidence of a positive bagpipe subculture in the capital: the publication of the first image of a bellows bagpipe there in 1728 14 and of lancashire bagpipe music in 12 highfill et al.: 4, 8. 13 Scottish bagpipes had recently been used in london to lead mobs participating in the highly destructive anti-Catholic gordon riots of the summer of 1780 (Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, london, 5 Jan. 1781). 14 This important image is part of a burlesque depiction of an ensemble of musicians playing for John gay’s famous 1728 ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera. First
COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD The TerMInOlOgy OF IrISh BellOWS-BlOWn BAgPIPeS 8 1730; 15 the sale (and probably the manufacture) of bellows bagpipes in 1743, as cited, and in the same year the publication of geoghegan’s tutor-tunebook for them, which includes english, Scottish and Irish tunes; the setting of stage jigs to Irish bagpipe tunes in 1751; 16 the advertising for ship’s bagpipers in 1768; 17 the patronage of Scottish highland and Irish bagpipers in the 1770s and 1780s, 18 and so forth. As the performer who first brought the new term ‘union pipes’ to the public, it is significant that Denis Courtney, in the advertisements for his first london performance, also used an altered stage form of his own surname: ‘Mr Courtenay’. It is not in doubt that his real name, in english, was Courtney. 19 Of the different forms of surname used for him in print, however, ‘Courtenay’ is not a form of the name found commonly in Ireland, although it was common in the Britain of his time and is of norman-French origin. It was the family name of well known contemporary english aristocrats, earls of Devon, and also the name of a prominent contemporary Westminster politician of Irish birth to whom advertised as a commercial print in The Daily Journal, london, 4 May 1728 (Barlow 2005: 90), the scene was long tentatively believed to have been drawn by William hogarth, and the image has been regarded as evidence of the existence of a bellows pipes in london by the 1720s. But expert opinion now holds the depiction to be the work of a French rather than a British artist; it may in fact therefore reflect a form of the instrument current in contemporary France rather than in Britain (for a discussion see Barlow 2005: 88–91). nevertheless it is inconceivable that bellows-blown bagpipes were unknown in contemporary london after they had been in existence on the Continent for well over a hundred years. 15 ‘new Musick. This day publish’d, The Third Book of the Most Celebrated Jigs... with hornpipes the Bagpipe Manner...’, Daily Journal, london, 12 Aug. 1730. 16 London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette, london, 12 Sept. 1751. 17 Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser, london, 29 June 1768. 18 See below. 19 Courtney’s first name, age, and the correct form of his surname in english are found in the burial register of Old St Pancras Church, london, where he was interred on 5 Sept. 1794. The register is now in the london Metropolitan Archives. The entry is in accord with other evidence cited below, including notices of Courtney’s death and his date and place of burial in contemporary print sources.
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Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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