Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

5 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
There is no reason to think that the different insular bellows-pipes
traditions did not arise independently of one other, nor is there any
evidence that they had an early influence on one other. But in 1743
the first English-language publication on the bellows pipe – The
Compleat Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe – alludes to the
existence of several contemporary makers of a developing bellows
bagpipe. 7 The instrument was sold in his music shop by John
Simpson, the London publisher of the Tutor, and is described in the
Tutor by its Irish author John Geoghegan; but it is not known
whether the makers referred to were British or Irish. Geoghegan’s
tutor is for a two-octave-plus chromatic bellows pipe with a lowest
chanter note of middle C, the second octave achieved by overblowing
(exerting increased air-pressure on the chanter reed by
squeezing the bag harder). It is not at all certain that the instrument
described by Geoghegan is a brand new one, in spite of his title;
possibly he had only coined a new marketing term for an established
bellows bagpipe. 8 His book would be obscurely republished and sold
into the early nineteenth century in England and Scotland, and
possibly sold in Ireland 9 and the United States 10 – an indication of
the continuing if low-level popularity of the instrument itself, which
is now well represented in museum collections. The instrument must
have had a general influence on the course of bellows-pipe
development in both Britain and Ireland.
7
‘This day is publish’d The Complete Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe...
by Mr. John Geoghegan...’, Daily Advertiser, London, 29 Sept. 1743 ff. See also
Donnelly 2008a: 26–7 for the assignment of this publication to 1743.
8
The instrument illustrated in the Tutor closely resembles one illustrated in a
London publication of 1728 (see Note 14 below).
9
Dennis Connor, a musical-instrument maker and seller of Little Christ-Church
Yard, Dublin, is advertising either ‘bagpipes’ or a tutor for the bagpipes (the
wording is ambiguous) in 1759 (Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, Dublin, 17–21 July
1759, see Carolan 2006: 23).
10
An anonymous tutor for bagpipes is advertised in Philadelphia in Stephen’s
Catalogue of Books etc. for 1795.