Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

7 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
Although the venue and the occasion are English, as will be seen
below the piper is Irish and his pipes are Irish pipes, and, insofar as it
was introduced by him, the term is also Irish.
‘Mr. Courtenay’ was the stage name of the professional bellows
piper Denis Courtney, an ‘itinerant Irish musician of great fame in
the British provinces’. 12 He was about twenty-eight when he made
his first London concert appearance on 14 May 1788, in the
company of other very different but well known performers and in
what was a leading London music venue. Courtney’s piping quickly
became famous in London and he had a somewhat meteoric career
before he died there in 1794, in his mid-thirties, of an illness brought
on by heavy drinking. Long after his death, he was remembered as
an outstanding musician.
Before Courtney’s debut, no bagpiper of any kind is known to have
given a stage recital in London, as distinct from performances in the
street and in taverns and ballrooms, from the accompanying of
dancers on stage, and from private recitals. Bagpipes had long been
generally spoken of in print in Britain, usually in unflattering terms,
and in their Scottish forms used to make oblique criticisms of
Scottish politicians at Westminster. They were bywords for riot, 13
drunkenness, low living and noise. Nor were Irish pipes exempt from
this latter criticism. The Scottish novelist Tobias Smollet compared
the piercing singing of a character in his 1751 London novel The
Adventures of Peregrine Pickle to ‘the joint issue of an Irish bagpipe
and a sow gelder’s horn’; this quip was reproduced over and
over in contemporary newspapers and magazines. Nevertheless there
is occasional print evidence of a positive bagpipe subculture in the
12
Highfill et al.: 4, 8.
13
The Scottish bagpipes had recently been used in London to lead mobs
participating in the highly destructive anti-Catholic Gordon riots of the summer
of 1780 (Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, London, 5 Jan. 1781).