Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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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
COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD The TerMInOlOgy OF IrISh BellOWS-BlOWn BAgPIPeS 96 Irish piping that now exist, by the insights of the many contemporary uilleann pipes makers who are now at work, and by the instrument’s vigorous and international playing tradition. With thanks especially to Seán Donnelly, Terry Moylan, Keith Sanger, Lisa Shields, and Jackie Small who read and commented on earlier drafts of this essay, and to Treasa Harkin and Jackie Small who prepared it for the ITMA website. Thanks also to the staffs of the Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin; Na Píobairí Uilleann, Dublin; the New York Public Library at Lincoln Centre; the Library of Trinity College Dublin; the National Library of Ireland, Dublin; the Library of the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin; the National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin; the Library of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin; and the Dublin City Library and Archive; and for information and help of various kinds to Denis Brooks, Faith and Ellen Carney, Patrick McSweeney, Michael O’Connor, Susan O’Regan, and Philip Shields. A version of this essay – ‘The Union Pipes: Their Birth and Death’ – was given by the author as the 2011 Breandán Breathnach Memorial Lecture of Na Píobairí Uilleann in 15 Henrietta St, Dublin, on 3 December 2011, and transmitted as a simultaneous webcast by NPU. Musical illustrations were played by Michael O’Brien, Dublin, uilleann pipes.
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Denis Courtney on stage in Oscar an
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COUrTney’S ‘UnIOn PIPeS’ AnD
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Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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