Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
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87 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES<br />
concert reports and radio listings, and from record labels, Leo<br />
Rowsome seems to have made the change-over in this latter period.<br />
In letters published in The Evening Herald of Dublin in May 1930,<br />
he and Seamus Mac Aonghusa were in agreement in using the new<br />
term, referring respectively to ‘<strong>Irish</strong> pipes’ and ‘uilleann pipes’,<br />
while Rowsome came back to refer to the ‘<strong>Irish</strong> (or uilleann) pipes’<br />
which had also the title of the ‘<strong>Irish</strong> Organ’. 320 William N. Andrews<br />
was billed as late as 1935 as playing the ‘union pipes’ on the radio,<br />
but this happened in Belfast, on BBC Northern Ireland, where the<br />
political neutrality of Courtney’s term was evidently still useful. In<br />
his Dublin advertising of the same time Andrews had succumbed to<br />
‘<strong>Irish</strong> uillean pipes’. 321 Kildare piper Sean Dempsey, recording<br />
commercially for the Regal Zonophone label in London and Dublin<br />
in 1936 and 1937, muddied the waters still further. In 1936 and 1937<br />
respectively he is playing the ‘<strong>Irish</strong> union pipes’ and the ‘<strong>Irish</strong> pipes’<br />
in London, according to his record labels, 322 while in 1937 he is also<br />
recording in Dublin on ‘<strong>Irish</strong> uilleann pipes’. 323<br />
In 1936 however a significant die was cast in the entire matter with<br />
the publication of the first <strong>Irish</strong> bellows pipes tutors to appear since<br />
those of the early nineteenth century: Tadhg Crowley’s How to Play<br />
the Uillean <strong>Pipes</strong>, published in Cork by Crowley himself, and Leo<br />
Rowsome’s Tutor for the Uileann <strong>Pipes</strong>, published in Dublin by the<br />
Dublin College of <strong>Music</strong>. In a move reminiscent of those of<br />
O’Farrell, Fitzmaurice and Murphy over a hundred years earlier in<br />
relation to ‘union pipes’, Flood’s new term was finally established in<br />
printed music-book form and by authors who were themselves<br />
pipers. Since he was a prize-winning performer, teacher, recording<br />
artist, broadcaster, pipe-maker and repairer, and inheritor of a family<br />
320<br />
Evening Herald, Dublin, 15, 20 & 21 May 1930.<br />
321<br />
Campbell 2011: 185.<br />
322<br />
Regal Zonophone IZ 603, Regal Zonophone IZ 656.<br />
323<br />
Regal Zonophone IZ 705.