Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

11 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
Ireland on the other hand, from a London perspective, was a separate
and somewhat distant landmass, culturally more alien and less
understood than Scotland. The majority of its inhabitants were
Catholics, adherents of a threatening Continental religion, and they
spoke a barbarous tongue, Irish. The country had long been
colonised and ruled by Britain but never completely subdued.
Agrarian disturbances were widespread there in the 1780s, and even
the Protestant ascendancy of its Dublin-based colonial parliament
was showing disquieting signs of legislative independence during the
decade. Those of its aristocrats who lived in London were largely
absentee landlords of British origins, unsympathetic to Irish
indigenous culture, and while they formed dining clubs in the city
there is no evidence that they offered patronage to Irish musicians.
Most of the city’s Irish population belonged to its often troublesome
underclass.
For these and other reasons, Irish music is poorly represented in
London publications and in public performance before Courtney’s
time. No separate collection of Irish music had been published there,
and when Irish melodies are published in London from the midseventeenth
century they appear as stray items in anthologies or as
afterthoughts in collections of ‘English, Scottish and Irish’ tunes.
The few ‘Irish’ songs known are mainly comic stage pieces put into
competitions were held in Scotland only. Apart from one instance of a Highland
piper playing in a ballroom, no Scottish pipers seem to have engaged in public
performance in London before the May 1788 appearance of Courtney. As will
be seen below, some of the Society’s prizewinners were briefly introduced to the
London stage in later 1788 and in 1791. The Society itself sometimes engaged
Irish bellows pipers, including Murphy, Courtney, McDonnell and O’Farrell
mentioned below, to play at their social occasions in London, and also (along
with Murphy) a ‘piper – Allan’ who may have been the famous Northumbrian
piper James Allan (see Sanger 2011: 21 and NLS MS Highland Society of
London Dep. 268/34 from which a facsimile of extracts was supplied to the
writer courtesy of Keith Sanger).