Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
89 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES<br />
eventually international) traditional-music organisation Comhaltas<br />
Ceoltóirí Éireann (CCÉ) – ‘Uilleann <strong>Pipes</strong>’ was the term used. 327<br />
From its earliest competitive fleadhanna ceoil festivals, modelled on<br />
the Gaelic League feiseanna, CCÉ also consistently used píob<br />
uilleann, ‘uilleann pipes’ to designate its bellows piping<br />
competitions, 328 and among its early printed Aims and Objects was<br />
‘to restore the playing of the Harp and Uilleann <strong>Pipes</strong> in the National<br />
life of Ireland’. 329 Under the influence doubtless of Seamus Ennis,<br />
son of James and also a leading <strong>Irish</strong> bellows piper, who went to<br />
work as a music collector for the station in Britain in 1951, the BBC<br />
in London also called the instrument ‘uilleann pipes’, 330 and this<br />
doubtless spread the term in Britain in the 1950s through the highly<br />
popular BBC folk programmes that Ennis was involved in.<br />
Occasional rear-guard actions in support of the older term took<br />
place, notably in 1954 by William A. Cocks in the 5th edition of<br />
Grove’s Dictionary of <strong>Music</strong> and <strong>Music</strong>ians – ‘<strong>Irish</strong> <strong>Union</strong> <strong>Pipes</strong>.<br />
This is the correct name, the mock-Gaelic term “Uilleann pipe” is<br />
now discredited.’ 331 – and as late as 1958 in the periodical Céilidhe<br />
Record, ‘the organ of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann’. This short-lived<br />
publication consistently talked about ‘union pipes’ in editorial text,<br />
to an extent that a puzzled reader wrote in to ask why it was referring<br />
to uilleann pipes in this way. 332<br />
But when in 1968 a new Dublin-based international organisation<br />
dedicated to the promotion of the <strong>Irish</strong> bellows pipes, and with full<br />
membership confined to pipers, was set up with the title of Na<br />
327<br />
NPU Seán Reid Collection, item SRF5D26.<br />
328<br />
See various early fleadh programmes in NPU Seán Reid Collection, passim.<br />
329<br />
NPU Seán Reid Collection, item SRF49D21.<br />
330<br />
BBC internal documentation, accessed Oct. 1996.<br />
331<br />
Vol. I, 346.<br />
332<br />
Céilidhe Record, Longford, May 1958.