Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive
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COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES 94<br />
contemporary writer considered that ‘His ingenuity seems to have<br />
made a new discovery in Instrumental <strong>Music</strong>’. The pipes that these<br />
Londoners heard however would not have been new to his <strong>Irish</strong><br />
audiences, to the poor compatriots in London whose company he<br />
frequented, or to the provincial audiences among whom he had first<br />
made a reputation in Britain. They are unlikely to have been<br />
particularly new to those in Britain who had been hearing <strong>Irish</strong> pipes<br />
played informally and in private for some decades, such as Lady<br />
Luxborough in 1751, the British king George II before 1760, 340 the<br />
Scottish Highland piper Joseph MacDonald writing in 1760, blind<br />
James Mullin’s audiences in the George Inn in Derby in 1766, the<br />
employers of the young servant piper with the ‘real old Egan in<br />
Dublin’ set of pipes in 1779, the British music historian Charles<br />
Burney studying the instrument about 1785, 341 the artist and<br />
musician John Baptist Malchair sketching a ‘blind <strong>Irish</strong> piper’ and<br />
writing tunes from him in Oxford in 1785, 342 or the <strong>Irish</strong> slum<br />
celebrants of St Patrick’s Day in London in 1786.<br />
What was really new was the term ‘union pipes’, and under this term<br />
the audacious introduction to an elite audience, in classical music<br />
terms, of an improved form of an alien instrument often associated<br />
with the lower classes. There is nowadays a consensus, highly<br />
plausible but based seemingly on deduction rather than on any<br />
precise evidence, that an early eighteenth-century low-pitched and<br />
continuously sounding bellows pipes with a bell-like foot-piece<br />
(resembling but not identical to John Geoghegan’s ‘pastoral or new<br />
bagpipe’ one-piece chanter of 1743) was improved about the 1750s<br />
or 1760s by having its foot-piece removed. 343 The chanter tenon thus<br />
340<br />
Walker 1786: 81: ‘I have been informed that George II was so much<br />
delighted with the performance of an <strong>Irish</strong> gentleman on the Bagpipes, that he<br />
ordered a medal to be struck for him’. King George II died in 1760.<br />
341<br />
Letter to Joseph Cooper Walker, quoted in Walker 1786: 78–9.<br />
342<br />
Wollenberg 2007: 151–61.<br />
343<br />
For a statement of this hypothesis see Brooks 1985a.