Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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.