Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

95
SOMe COnSIDerATIOnS ArISIng
If Denis Courtney’s ‘union pipes’ were not then in fact a new
instrument, but a new name for an existing instrument, there is a need
for some revision of bellows-bagpipe terminology as used hitherto in
bagpipe studies and museum catalogues. In such sources ‘union pipes’
has often been used as a convenient term to distinguish the earlier
eighteenth-century bellows legato bagpipes with a foot-joint, of the
1740s ‘pastoral’ type, from the later bellows pipes with a stoppable
end-tenon and a staccato capability, supposedly of the ‘union’ type.
Without doubt players and makers after Courtney’s time did use his
term to refer to bellows pipes of this latter type, but it cannot be accurately
used to label all such bellows pipes, and certainly not those that
pre-date his death in 1794, unless there is future agreement among
organologists to employ it deliberately as an ahistorical but convenient
diagnostic term, much as Irish writers now use ‘uilleann pipes’ for
forms of the instrument in existence before 1903.
Discussions of bellows pipes in Britain and Ireland have frequently
been bedeviled by the lack of a clear chronology for the history of the
various forms of the instruments. It is hoped that the unrolling above
of a chronology for terms used for the Irish bellows pipes, indicating
as it does both exact moments of change and of less exactly datable
trends in terminology, will provide a scaffolding for greater projects:
for the building of an accurate chronology for the physical development
of the instrument itself, and the compiling of a history of its performance
practice. here the best hope still remains a programme of
detailed organological description of older surviving sets, newly contextualised
by contemporary information about the instrument which
continues to emerge from ongoing print digitisation projects and also
by the surprising number of visual illustrations of early instruments
and piping practice that have recently come to light. This programme
will be animated by the large body of sound and video recordings of