Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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