Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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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).
COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 12 the mouths of Irish servants; few of the many Irish actors in London specialised in Irish song. As the British music historian Sir John Hawkins said in about 1785: ‘I know of no Irish airs so much celebrated in England as the Scotch have been’. 24 This situation began to change in London in the 1780s: the Dublin dramatist John O’Keefe introduced harp tunes by the famous Irish harper-composer Turlough Carolan (1670–1738) and other Irish melodies in his musical plays there from 1783; 25 Dubliner Joseph Cooper Walker’s Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards, the first book on Irish music, was published and seriously reviewed in London in 1786, 26 and The Hibernian Muse, the first British-published collection of Irish music, appeared there in 1790. 27 The performances of Courtney, who was widely recognised as an Irish piper, doubtless helped contribute to this change of climate. But in reference to the Irish bagpipe specifically, James Dungan, an Irish patron of traditional music, said in the 1780s: ‘I consider my native country half a century behind Scotland in encouraging and rewarding their best performers on the bagpipe’. 28 Although Denis Courtney was part of a modernising trend in contemporary Irish life – entrepreneurial, outward-looking, 24 Letter to Joseph Cooper Walker quoted in Walker 1786: 66. Hawkins excepted only ‘The Black Joke’, correctly regarding this as being an Irish tune of modern composition. 25 Fiske 1986: 459–61. 26 In European Magazine and London Review vol. 19 (1786): 369–72 and Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal vol. LXXVII (July–Dec. 1787): 425–39, for instance. 27 ‘Music lately published, and sold by Messrs. Thompson... The Caledonian Muse; a Collection of scarce and favourite Scots Tunes... The Hibernian Muse; a Collection of Irish Airs...’, The World, London, 23 Oct. 1790. The volume carries no publication date and has been assigned to c. 1786 in some library catalogues. 28 Quoted by Arthur O’Neill in O’Sullivan 1958: II, 163. James Dungan, an Irish merchant in Denmark inspired by the Highland Society of London, funded three competitive harp festivals in Granard, Co Longford, in the 1780s (see Donnelly 1993: 27–9).
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Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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