Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
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79 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES<br />
pipes is an Anglicised corruption of Piobai Uileann, or elbowpipes’.<br />
283<br />
Flood (1857–1928) was an industrious researcher and a prolific<br />
writer on <strong>Irish</strong> music from the late nineteenth century until his death.<br />
But he was criticised in his own time, even by his supporters, for his<br />
failure to cite sources and for chauvinistically going beyond his<br />
evidence, and his voluminous published writings are a confusing<br />
mixture of the reliable and the unreliable. 284 He had little or no <strong>Irish</strong>.<br />
In this introduction of the new term he is reported as recycling<br />
General Charles Vallancey’s coinage ‘Ullan pipes’ as published by<br />
Joseph Cooper Walker in 1786, and as accepting its supposed<br />
connection with the <strong>Irish</strong> word for elbow as cited by Walker above.<br />
From the report of the lecture it is clear that Walker’s book (rather<br />
than Vallancey directly) was Flood’s source. Flood subsequently<br />
used a variety of spellings for his new term (all approximating to<br />
inflected forms of uille, the <strong>Irish</strong> word for elbow, which also has the<br />
alternative nominative form uillinn). 285 He does not however address<br />
the fact that this supposedly authentic <strong>Irish</strong>-language term is<br />
nowhere found before Vallancey or Walker (neither of them <strong>Irish</strong><br />
speakers); on the contrary he implies that he is restoring an Englishcorrupted<br />
term to its <strong>Irish</strong>-original purity.<br />
283<br />
Reported in The United <strong>Irish</strong>man, Dublin, 17 Oct. 1903 (for details see<br />
Carolan 1981: 4–9). ‘Cuish pipes’ are Vallancey’s ‘Cuisli <strong>Pipes</strong>’ passed on by<br />
Walker as ‘Cuisle <strong>Pipes</strong>’ (see Notes 54–6 above).<br />
284<br />
In the 1980s the present writer saw a library notebook of his in the possession<br />
of his son in Wexford, and found his writing close to illegible. Doubtless Flood<br />
himself had difficulty in subsequently reading his hastily scribbled notes, copied<br />
mostly from sources in Dublin and London libraries in intervals snatched from<br />
his work as a church organist.<br />
285<br />
The now standard spelling ‘uilleann’ is the genitive singular of the nominative<br />
uille, although the word is actually pronounced more like the alternative<br />
nominative uillinn. It has often been spelled with one l or one n. The confusion<br />
is a symptom of the unhistorical origins of the term.