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 4<br />
existence by the late seventeenth century, 6 and to have been subject<br />
to processes of development that continued through the eighteenth<br />
and into the nineteenth centuries. Distinct traditions of bellows-pipes<br />
manufacture and playing would survive in Scotland, northern<br />
England, and Ireland after bagpipes had fallen out of favour in most<br />
of Britain. No early insular makers are known, but the attachment of<br />
bellows to existing types of bagpipes, or the importation of a small<br />
number of Continental bellows pipes, probably of different kinds,<br />
would have been sufficient to set chain reactions in motion among<br />
innovative makers. Bellows pipes would always be peripheral<br />
instruments in these islands, and would never be played in any great<br />
numbers. They would never begin to rival the recorder, violin,<br />
German flute or keyboard instruments in popularity, and the major<br />
music publishers of Britain and Ireland would not publish music or<br />
tutors for them as they would for those instruments. But bellows<br />
pipes have often been accorded an elite status, specialist publishers<br />
have long produced tutors and tune books for them, and they have<br />
exerted a persistent, powerful and unique fascination on players and<br />
listeners here for over three centuries now. They currently enjoy an<br />
unprecedented worldwide level of popularity.<br />
6<br />
For Britain there is the evidence of the English playwright Thomas Shadwell<br />
who in his 1671 play The Humorists refers to ‘a Scotch-Bag-Pipe that has got a<br />
flaw in the Bellows’ (quoted in Stewart 2009: 53; from Keith Sanger) and that<br />
of the English organologist James Talbot who c. 1685–1700 listed ‘Scotch’<br />
bellows bagpipes which he had seen (Cocks 1952: 44–5). In both instances<br />
‘Scotch’ may mean ‘north British’. By the 1720s there is further evidence of<br />
various kinds of Scottish and northern English bellows pipes (Sanger 1989: 11–<br />
13). The <strong>Irish</strong> evidence is less explicit, not mentioning bellows until the 1750s,<br />
but there are references from the 1680s to bagpipes being played in domestic<br />
settings with harp and fiddle and these must have been pipes of the new kind<br />
(Carolan 2010: 6–7). Larry Neal M’Elvanna, an ‘<strong>Irish</strong> piper of note’ who died in<br />
Co Down in 1746 in his 78th year, was reported as having learned to play the<br />
pipes from Piper Malone of Lurgan, ‘who died in 1700 at the advanced age of<br />
100’ (Walker’s Courant, Sept. 1746, quoted in An Píobaire vol. 3, no 35, Apr.<br />
1998: 23). By 1746 a noted <strong>Irish</strong> piper was doubtless a bellows piper.