Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

95 COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES
exposed could then be held against a knee-pad ad lib to create
moments of silence on the higher-pitched chanter and introduce
staccato playing with new kinds of ornamentation. These
developments, with new high standards of wood-turning and
manufacturing finish and reliability, the hypothesis holds, had been
taking place in Ireland. 344 Courtney’s influential patrons, his new
emollient marketing term, and above all his musical abilities,
enabled him, it seems, to introduce these novel developments to the
British capital, at the highest social levels, and to enjoy continuous
success there by means of them for the rest of his short life. As far as
his London concert audiences were concerned, he had introduced a
new species of music, one which would live after him. But the term
does not imply a new organological development, merely a highly
visible introduction into London, by the first Irish piper to make a
public name for performance in Britain, of a development which had
seemingly taken place in Ireland some decades earlier. In this,
Courtney can be seen an important figure in the history of the
globalisation of Irish music. This process had been underway with
regard to the Irish harp in Britain and Europe since Elizabethan
times, and with regard to the Irish bellows pipes in Britain and north
America (and even as far as British India) from the earlier eighteenth
century. But Courtney clearly brought these pipes to a new level of
international attention in the late eighteenth century – and
subsequently through his continuing influence.
If Denis Courtney’s ‘union pipes’ were not then in fact a new
instrument, but a new name for an existing instrument, there is a
need for some revision of bellows-bagpipe terminology as used
hitherto in bagpipe studies and museum catalogues. In such sources
‘union pipes’ has often been used as a convenient term to distinguish
the earlier eighteenth-century bellows legato bagpipes with a foot-
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For pre-Courtney Irish-made bellows pipes, see Donnelly 1983, Donnelly
2002, and Carolan 2006.