Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

15 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
references are found to Irish pipes that are or seem bellows-blown,
some of them in British and north American sources. Visual
illustrations of bellows-blown pipes begin to appear in Ireland from
about 1750, and some instruments of the 1760s and 1770s survive in
Irish museum collections and in private hands. They continued in
these years before Courtney’s debut to be called ‘pipes’ in Ireland,
or, when referred to more formally in newspapers and especially in
the travel accounts of tourists, ‘Irish pipes’.
In Britain, the otherness of Irish pipes and pipers, when they began
to be noticed in print from the 1730s, 31 leads to them being normally
described as ‘Irish pipes’ and ‘Irish pipers’. Again the terminology is
confusing. Are they players of a familiar kind of mouth-blown or
bellows-blown pipes who just happen to be Irish, or are they players
of a distinct form of the instrument called ‘Irish pipes’? In 1743, as
already mentioned, an Irish piper in London, John Geoghegan,
introduced to the public the terms ‘Pastoral or New Bagpipe’ for
bellows pipes, and defined a particular form of these pipes in some
detail. But his new terms failed to be adopted generally, 32 and later in
the same decade reference is again found in London to an ‘Irish
bagpipes player’. 33
In an English letter of 10 July 1751 the ‘Irish Bag-pipes’ are
unambiguously defined as a distinct bellows-blown instrument by
31
‘… a noted Irish Bagpiper, and Midnight Bully.’ Daily Post, London, 19 June
1732, for example (reference courtesy Seán Donnelly).
32
However, after being noticed again by organologists in the 1950s and 1960s,
Geoghegan’s ‘pastoral pipes’ term has come into currency within the last thirty
years among an international subculture of makers and musicians interested in
surviving instruments which resemble his, and in music which survives for
them.
33
‘Committed... to the Gatehouse... Thomas Martin the famous Irish bagpipes
player, for playing many tunes commonly used among the rebels..., Whitehall
Evening Post or London Intelligencer, London, 27–29 Dec. 1748.