Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

93 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
Some Considerations Arising
Were Denis Courtney’s ‘union pipes’ Irish pipes, or were they
something else? On the present evidence, it would have to be said
that they did belong to the range of bellows pipes known to his
contemporaries by the catch-all term ‘Irish pipes’. 339 As has been
seen, this piper who introduced and established the term was Irish,
explicitly described as such in contemporary sources; he played
‘Irish pipes’ and in Ireland his ‘union pipes’ were called ‘our
favourite national instrument’; he played in recitals with the Irish
bellows pipers Murphy and McDonnell, both of whom then called
their instrument ‘Irish pipes’; his ‘union pipes’ were highly
acceptable to his Irish audiences who were familiar with the native
form of the instrument; he played Irish melodies, some with titles in
Irish; his earliest successors as performers on the union pipes (some
of them music editors and publishers) were mostly Irish; and the
union pipes were frequently labeled ‘Irish’ after his death, even by
Scottish players who used the term. Later again, in the United States,
Australia and Canada, the union pipes were more often than not also
characterised as ‘Irish’, and in Ireland even Irish-speaking and
nationally minded pipers clung to the term ‘union pipes’ as late as
the mid-twentieth century.
Did Courtney introduce a ‘new species of music’, as was said by the
Times writer the morning after his 1788 London debut? Only as far
as his fashionable London audience in the Free Mason’s Hall was
concerned, although not otherwise. As said, his audience in Vauxhall
Gardens a few days later found his music ‘single and novel’, and a
339
Both ‘Irish pipes’ and ‘union pipes’ have been used to cover a range of
variant forms of Irish bellows pipes, and the term may also sometimes have
been later applied in Britain to bellows pipes that were not Irish. ‘Irish pipes’
and ‘union pipes’ have been applied also to ‘pastoral pipes’ of the type
described in 1743 by John Geoghegan and which survived into the next century,
but to what degree these were Irish is a question for another time.