Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 14
Forerunners of ‘Union Pipes’
As an Irish player of bellows-blown bagpipes, Denis Courtney
would most likely have been described in Britain before May 1788
as an ‘Irish piper’ playing the ‘Irish pipes’. This was the commonest
of the terms used there before that date for bellows pipes played by
Irish pipers.
In Ireland however the bagpipe in all its forms was earliest simply
referred to in Irish as píb, píob, píopaí, píb mhála (from the medieval
Latin loan-word pipa) or in English by the equivalent ‘pipe’, ‘pipes’
or ‘bagpipe(s)’; there was normally no need there to characterise
them as ‘Irish’. 29 Confusingly, these shorthand terms in Irish and
English were also used in Ireland into the eighteenth century to refer
to mouth-blown bagpipes as well as to bellows-blown bagpipes.
Early Irish terminology does not therefore help in distinguishing one
kind of bagpipe from another. Instead, notice must be taken of the
social context of playing: whether it takes place indoors or outdoors,
for listening or dancing or marching to, with other domestic musical
instruments, and so on. Notice must also be taken of the range of
music played on it: whether it falls within the range of the Irish
mouth-blown bagpipe – which is believed to have had the same ninenote
(or smaller) compass typical of mouth-blown bagpipes
internationally 30 – or is music of a two-octave-plus range such as was
employed in contemporary Ireland in traditional and popular music
by the harp, recorder, violin, German flute and oboe. The wider
range of the new bagpipe enabled it to play in ensemble with these
instruments. On this basis, as already mentioned, bellows pipes are
referred to in print in Ireland from the late 1600s. From then to 1788,
29
‘Pipes’ continues to be the everyday casual and conversational term used by
uilleann pipers for their instrument in Ireland today; ‘uilleann pipes’ is used
when speaking formally, or when distinguishing the instrument from Irish
mouth-blown pipes (also still referred to casually by their players as ‘pipes’).
30
Baines 1995: 20.