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 68<br />
playing Highland pipes and ‘<strong>Union</strong> pipe’ in Perth. 210 A dancing and<br />
music master Mr Mackenzie, again by his name Scottish, had died in<br />
Derby by 1835 and the auction of his varied musical instrument<br />
collection included his Highland pipes and ‘his celebrated Set of<br />
<strong>Union</strong> <strong>Pipes</strong>’. 211 Robert Millar (1789–1861), piper to the Aberdeen<br />
Highland Society, when referred to in 1836, was also in this multipipes<br />
playing tradition which included union pipes. Millar played a<br />
set made by Robert Reid of North Shields which was presented to<br />
him in 1830, and he compiled a manuscript of over 300 tunes begun<br />
by him in Montrose that year for the ‘<strong>Union</strong> Bag-pipe, &’. 212 As late<br />
as 1842, a ‘Mr. Donald, the celebrated player on the <strong>Union</strong> pipe’ was<br />
entertaining the Operative Conservative Society of Ripon with<br />
‘many beautiful Scotch Airs’. 213 Even Scots in the New World, in<br />
Detroit, had a taste for the union pipes and are spoken of in the<br />
1870s as having patronised there ‘Mike Gill, a Celebrated Player on<br />
the <strong>Union</strong> <strong>Pipes</strong>’, who may have been <strong>Irish</strong>. 214<br />
There is some evidence too that Courtney’s term was occasionally<br />
applied to the very different Northumbrian bellows pipes. Robert<br />
Eliot Bewick (1788–1849), son of the famous Northumbrian<br />
engraver Thomas Bewick and a Northumbrian piper, a pupil of John<br />
Peacock’s, was described by an acquaintance as playing the ‘union<br />
pipes’ when it is clear from his description that Bewick was playing<br />
210<br />
Cannon 1980: 12; Campbell 2011: 22–3. On an undated item of sheet music<br />
‘A Favorite Waltz and March Composed for the Piano Forte…’ by McGregor<br />
and published in London by J. Briggs, he describes himself as a ‘teacher of the<br />
union pipes’ (University of Cambridge online library catalogue, 1 May 2012,<br />
which dates it as [1815?]).<br />
211<br />
Derby Mercury, Derby, 22 Apr. 1835.<br />
212<br />
Edinburgh Evening Courant, Edinburgh, 4 Feb. 1836, quoted in MacInnes<br />
1986: 21; Cannon 1993: 30–6; Keith Sanger research notes, kindly<br />
communicated by him, Apr. 2012.<br />
213<br />
Leeds Intelligencer, Leeds, 21 Mar. 1842.<br />
214<br />
Wanless 1872: 48–51: ‘When Mike play’d up an <strong>Irish</strong> reel,/ We neither<br />
minded maut or meal’.