Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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19 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES Irish of London celebrating St Patrick’s Day in the ghetto of St Giles. 47 Some other minor terms were used in the eighteenth century for Irish bellows pipes, or what seem to be such. Among the earliest of these was ‘the Irish organ’ (and variant forms) which first appears in 1733 in a Dublin reference to ‘an Organ Piper’, 48 and later and more explicitly in Cork in the 1770s and 1780s, 49 and in Scotland in the 1780s. 50 Also in the 1770s ‘small pipes’, which may or may not be bellows pipes, are referred to in a Co Kildare context. 51 A reported Cork printed advertisement, seemingly of the 1780s but possibly earlier or later, refers to ‘common Large pipes Small pipes & and Dunn the pipers way of playing ye large Soft pipes whether the Scholer can read or write’; 52 presumably some if not all of these are bellows pipes. ‘Parlour pipes’ was also used of the instrument. 53 Irish antiquarians of the 1780s used a variety of terms. About 1784 the unreliable antiquarian speculator General Charles Vallancey observed to the twenty-four-year-old Joseph Cooper Walker, who 47 General Advertiser, London, 21 Mar. 1786. 48 Lawler 1733, quoted in Donnelly 1994a: 42–5. 49 Hibernian Chronicle, Cork, 26 July 1773, 12 Sept. 1774, and 4 Apr. 1784. For details see Carolan 1984: 59–61. 50 Cheape 2008b: 117. 51 ‘On the 25th ult. departed his life at Athy in the County of Kildare in the 80th year of his age... James Purcell, commonly known by the name of Baron Purcell of Loakman... his will... ‘... my body shall be preceded to the grave by twelve of the best performers on the small pipes which can be had, to whom I will one crown each for playing my favourite tune of Granuail... The pipers attended...’ (Hibernian Magazine, Dublin, Dec. 1774). 52 Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society vol. XLI (1936): 52 (reference courtesy Seán Donnelly). Dunn’s instructions were presumably the pipes gamut in tablature. 53 NLI Séamus Ó Casaide MS 8118(2). No date is given for this usage, but the term was a common one, often used in Britain as well as Ireland and over a wide period of time.
COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 20 was then researching in Dublin the first book on Irish music, that the Irish had pipes of two kinds, ‘one filled by the mouth, the other modern by the bellows at the elbow or Uilean’, 54 the latter word a form of the Irish word for elbow. In referring to the old Irish word ‘Cuislanagh, Pipers’, Vallancey says ‘I think Bagpipers; because they at this day call a piper by that name, and he names the bellows, bollog na Cuisli, the bellows of the Cuisli, or Veins of the Arm, at the first joint, and on the outside is Ullan or the Elbow – so that I take Ullan Pipes and Cuisli pipes to be the same...’. 55 Vallancey’s coinage of ‘Ullan Pipes’ was motivated by a wish to make a connection with the ‘woollen pipes’ of Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. When Walker came to print in 1786 he repeated Vallancey’s observations and passed on his supposition: ‘Vallency [sic] concludes that Ullan Pipes and Cuisle Pipes are one and the same’. 56 In time, as will be seen, this first term, which has no ancestry before Vallancey but was coined by him, would give rise to the term ‘uilleann pipes’. 54 Charles Vallancey to Joseph Cooper Walker in undated questionnaire, TCD MS 1461 (I) T51, fols 182–6. 55 Charles Vallancey, undated letter to Joseph Cooper Walker, in TCD MS 1461–7 T.66 fol. 242. ‘Cuisli Pipes’ were not bagpipes but mouth-blown Irish pipes of antiquity. 56 Walker 1786: 76. This is the first appearance of these terms in print. For further details see Carolan 1981: 4–9. Another unreliable contemporary Irish antiquarian, William Beauford, incorrectly used the term adharcaidh ciuil for bagpipes (Beauford 1781: 244) but he meant mouth-blown bagpipes. Walker 1786: 76 followed Beauford in this.
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