Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
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COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 10<br />
publications from the mid-1600s. But in the last fifteen years of the<br />
seventeenth century there ‘a liking for Scotch-style music became a<br />
positive craze’. 22 It was a craze that would last for over a hundred<br />
years. Chiefly this came about because of the innate attractiveness of<br />
Scottish (and faux-Scottish) melodies and songs to the English ear,<br />
and their exotic yet familiar character. But their acceptability must<br />
have been increased by the legislative union of England and<br />
Scotland which was brought into effect in 1707, and by the<br />
patronage of Scottish members of Parliament in London. Certainly<br />
there was a buying public in London for Scottish music throughout<br />
the century, and Scottish pieces featured prominently there in ballad<br />
operas and entr’acte performances. Many were published in London<br />
from the 1720s by the migrant Scottish music publishers William<br />
Thompson, James Oswald and Robert Bremner. Their popularity<br />
increased as Scottishness became less and less threatening in<br />
England after the defeat of the Stuart cause at Culloden in 1746, the<br />
subsequent absorption of Highland soldiers (and their military<br />
bagpipes) into the regular British army, and their emergence as<br />
British heroes in such engagements as the battle of Quebec in 1759.<br />
After the publication, beginning in 1760, of the poeticised<br />
‘translations’ into English by James MacPherson from the<br />
supposedly original Gaelic poems of Ossian, a Scottish bard of the<br />
third century, and their extraordinary Europe-wide success, positive<br />
ideas of Scottishness were further established in contemporary<br />
London consciousness. This was aided by the founding there in 1778<br />
of the Highland Society of London and by its high-profile<br />
aristocratic support for indigenous Scottish culture, including the<br />
publishing of ‘ancient Scotch music’ in the capital in 1784. 23<br />
22<br />
Fiske 1983: 5. See Fiske for a detailed discussion of Scottish music in<br />
eighteenth-century England.<br />
23<br />
A Collection of Highland Vocal Airs, Never Hitherto Published by Patrick<br />
MacDonald: advertised in The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser,<br />
London, 11 Nov. 1784. The Society also encouraged the playing of the mouthblown<br />
Highland bagpipes by offering prizes at annual competitions, but these