Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

More documents

Recommendations

Info

91 DeMISe OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ knew well by family tradition and by scholarship that ‘uilleann pipes’ was a recent coinage, but he had, as often, the definitive attitude to the matter: his friends and colleagues remember that he regarded it as ‘pedantic’ to oppose the choice of practitioners in their decisive adoption of ‘uilleann pipes’.
COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD The TerMInOlOgy OF IrISh BellOWS-BlOWn BAgPIPeS 92 Some Considerations Arising Were Denis Courtney’s ‘union pipes’ Irish pipes, or were they something else? On the present evidence, it would have to be said that they did belong to the range of bellows pipes known to his contemporaries by the catch-all term ‘Irish pipes’. 339 As has been seen, this piper who introduced and established the term was Irish, explicitly described as such in contemporary sources; he played ‘Irish pipes’ and in Ireland his ‘union pipes’ were called ‘our favourite national instrument’; he played in recitals with the Irish bellows pipers Murphy and McDonnell, both of whom at that time called their instrument ‘Irish pipes’; his ‘union pipes’ were highly acceptable to his Irish audiences who were familiar with the native form of the instrument; he played Irish melodies, some with titles in Irish; his earliest successors as performers on the union pipes (some of them music editors and publishers) were mostly Irish; and the union pipes were frequently labeled ‘Irish’ after his death, even by Scottish players who used the term. later again, in the United States, Australia and Canada, the union pipes were more often than not also characterised as ‘Irish’, and in Ireland even Irish-speaking and nationally minded pipers clung to the term ‘union pipes’ as late as the mid-twentieth century. Did Courtney introduce a ‘new species of music’, as was said by the Times writer the morning after his 1788 london debut? Only as far as his fashionable london audience in the Free Mason’s hall was 339 Both ‘Irish pipes’ and ‘union pipes’ have been used to cover a range of variant forms of Irish bellows pipes, and the term may also sometimes have been later applied in Britain to bellows pipes that were not Irish. ‘Irish pipes’ and ‘union pipes’ have been applied also to ‘pastoral pipes’ of the type described in 1743 by John geoghegan and which survived into the next century, but to what degree these were Irish is a question for another time.
Page 1 and 2:
Denis Courtney on stage in Oscar an
Page 3 and 4:
COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD
Page 5 and 6:
Page 7 and 8:
Page 9 and 10:
Page 11 and 12:
Page 13 and 14:
Page 15 and 16:
Page 17 and 18:
Page 19 and 20:
Page 21 and 22:
Page 23 and 24:
Page 25 and 26:
Page 27 and 28:
Page 29 and 30:
Page 31 and 32:
Page 33 and 34:
Page 35 and 36:
Page 37 and 38:
Page 39 and 40:
Page 41 and 42: COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD
Page 91: COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD
show all

Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?