Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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9 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES for him in print, however, ‘Courtenay’ is not a form of the name found commonly in Ireland, although it was common in the Britain of his time and is of Norman-French origin. It was the family name of well known contemporary English aristocrats, Earls of Devon, and also the name of a prominent contemporary Westminster politician of Irish birth to whom the piper was once compared. 20 ‘Courtney’ on the other hand is a surname common in Ireland, even to the present day, and, as well as also being a form of the Norman-French Courtenay there, is an anglicised version of more than one Gaelic surname. 21 Courtney the piper – or his media handler – may have made the change to an almost identical surname that was known and accepted in Britain, one with flatteringly topical and aristocratic overtones. His experiences in the British provinces may have suggested that a slight change in surname for his London launch would be advisable. He may likewise have felt that a name-change would render his Irish pipes more acceptable to the musical public of the metropolis. To understand why Courtney or his promoters may have felt this, it is necessary to know something of the relative positions in 1788 London of Scottish and Irish music; it is mainly within the context of these ethnic musics that the union pipes would have their British future. It was Scottish music that had long been popular in London, in print and on the stage and in general musical culture, not Irish. There had been a certain fashion for Scottish culture in London since the accession of James VI and I to the English throne in 1603, and an increasing number of Scottish melodies were to be found in English notices of Courtney’s death and his date and place of burial in contemporary print sources. 20 John Courtenay, born ‘Courtney’ in Co Louth, see Thorne 2004. For the comparison see below. 21 The surname Courtney is found in various parts of Ireland but principally clusters in Kerry and adjoining counties and in southern Ulster. In Gaelic it is Ó Curnáin, Mac Cuarta, etc. (MacLysaght 1996: 65).
COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 10 publications from the mid-1600s. But in the last fifteen years of the seventeenth century there ‘a liking for Scotch-style music became a positive craze’. 22 It was a craze that would last for over a hundred years. Chiefly this came about because of the innate attractiveness of Scottish (and faux-Scottish) melodies and songs to the English ear, and their exotic yet familiar character. But their acceptability must have been increased by the legislative union of England and Scotland which was brought into effect in 1707, and by the patronage of Scottish members of Parliament in London. Certainly there was a buying public in London for Scottish music throughout the century, and Scottish pieces featured prominently there in ballad operas and entr’acte performances. Many were published in London from the 1720s by the migrant Scottish music publishers William Thompson, James Oswald and Robert Bremner. Their popularity increased as Scottishness became less and less threatening in England after the defeat of the Stuart cause at Culloden in 1746, the subsequent absorption of Highland soldiers (and their military bagpipes) into the regular British army, and their emergence as British heroes in such engagements as the battle of Quebec in 1759. After the publication, beginning in 1760, of the poeticised ‘translations’ into English by James MacPherson from the supposedly original Gaelic poems of Ossian, a Scottish bard of the third century, and their extraordinary Europe-wide success, positive ideas of Scottishness were further established in contemporary London consciousness. This was aided by the founding there in 1778 of the Highland Society of London and by its high-profile aristocratic support for indigenous Scottish culture, including the publishing of ‘ancient Scotch music’ in the capital in 1784. 23 22 Fiske 1983: 5. See Fiske for a detailed discussion of Scottish music in eighteenth-century England. 23 A Collection of Highland Vocal Airs, Never Hitherto Published by Patrick MacDonald: advertised in The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, London, 11 Nov. 1784. The Society also encouraged the playing of the mouthblown Highland bagpipes by offering prizes at annual competitions, but these
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Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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