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