Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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SOMe COnSIDerATIOnS ArISIng
concerned, although not otherwise. As said, his audience in Vauxhall
gardens a few days later found his music ‘single and novel’, and a
contemporary writer considered that ‘his ingenuity seems to have
made a new discovery in Instrumental Music’. The pipes that these
londoners heard however would not have been new to his Irish
audiences, to the poor compatriots in london whose company he frequented,
or to the provincial audiences among whom he had first
made a reputation in Britain. They are unlikely to have been
particularly new to those in Britain who had been hearing Irish pipes
played informally and in private for some decades, such as lady
luxborough in 1751, the British king george II before 1760, 340 the
Scottish highland piper Joseph MacDonald writing in 1760, blind
James Mullin’s audiences in the george Inn in Derby in 1766, the
employers of the young servant piper with the ‘real old egan in
Dublin’ set of pipes in 1779, the British music historian Charles
Burney studying the instrument about 1785, 341 the artist and musician
John Baptist Malchair sketching a ‘blind Irish piper’ and writing
tunes from him in Oxford in 1785, 342 or the Irish slum celebrants of
St Patrick’s Day in london in 1786.
What was really new was the term ‘union pipes’, and under this term
the audacious introduction to an elite audience, in classical music
terms, of an improved form of an alien instrument often associated
with the lower classes. There is nowadays a consensus, highly plausible
but based seemingly on deduction rather than on any precise
evidence, that an early eighteenth-century low-pitched and
340
Walker 1786: 81: ‘I have been informed that george II was so much delighted
with the performance of an Irish gentleman on the Bagpipes, that he ordered a
medal to be struck for him’. King george II died in 1760.
341
letter to Joseph Cooper Walker, quoted in Walker 1786: 78–9.
342
Wollenberg 2007: 151–61.