Denis Courtney on stage in Oscar and Malvina, Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London. Engraving by Barlow after Isaac Cruikshank. FromThe Whim of the Day of 1793, London, 1793 (courtesy Na Píobairí Uilleann) COURTNEY’S ‘UNION PIPES’ AND THE TERMINOLOGY OF IRISH BELLOWS-BLOWN BAGPIPES Nicholas Carolan, Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin Version 1.0 as at 14 May 20121 Irish uilleann pipers and followers of the uilleann pipes generally know nowadays that their instrument was once often known as the ‘union pipes’.2The term was one of those commonly used before 1900 to refer to variant forms of the bellows-blown bagpipe found in Britain and Ireland, the United States of America, Australia, and elsewhere. After 1900 it continued in use but gradually gave way in Ireland to ‘uilleann pipes’,3which term eventually spread to be used universally, or almost so, for the Irish form of the instrument. There is nevertheless uncertainty about the term ‘union pipes’ – its origin, forerunners, meanings, spread and demise – and it is proposed 1Much of the information on which this essay on Irish music terminology is based has been newly discovered through ongoing international print and image digitisation programmes. Since other relevant information will doubtless emerge from these sources in the future, the essay will be updated here to include such information as it is found. For expansion of bibliographic etc. citations see Information Sources below. Corrections and earlier instances of terms cited can be sent to [email protected], but because of other commitments it will not be possible for the writer to enter into correspondence. The essay should be cited by author, title, version and date on www.itma.ieas above. 2This form of the term is used throughout here for convenience, except in quotations, but the term also occurs in historical sources as ‘union pipe(s)’, ‘union bag(-)pipe(s)’, ‘Irish union pipes’, etc., and its elements are often given initial capitals. Original spellings and initial capitalisation (only) have been retained here in quotations. Primary sources quoted have been checked unless otherwise stated. 3This term also appears in variant spellings in older sources and often with initial capitals: ‘ullann’, ‘uileann’, ‘uillinn’, ‘ullian (bag-)pipe(s)’, etc. Introduced only in the twentieth century, it is the term now in standard use in Ireland to refer (ahistorically) to Irish bellows pipes of any period and in any place. COUrTney’S‘UnIOnPIPeS’ AnDTheTerMInOlOgyOFIrIShBellOWS-BlOWnBAgPIPeS 2 here to examine these aspects, and to establish an outline history of the term. Other terms for the uilleann pipes are also traced. As well as core questions of terminology, consideration of ‘union pipes’ also necessarily touches on the whole history and historiography of Irish bagpiping, and involves other dimensions of Irish musical culture: artistic processes and allegiances; national identity and self- representation, especially in relation to the Irish language; and the ongoing globalisation of Irish traditional music. It must be emphasised that only the history of the term is being centrally addressed, not the history of the instrumentitself. Although the two are of course related, they have led somewhat independent lives. Changes in terminology did not necessarily reflect develop- ments in the physical nature of the instrument; such developments did not necessarily lead to the introduction of new terminology. But to provide a context for the discussion of piping terminology, some brief consideration of the history of the instrument itself is un- avoidable. Bagpipes are musical wind instruments consisting of a reeded melody-pipe or chanter with finger-holes by which the player produces melody, an attached skin bag acting as an air-reservoir, a blow-pipe attached to the bag by which the player inflates it, and, normally, reeded fixed-pitch melody-pipes attached to the bag which provide a droning accompaniment to the chanter. Known in classical times, they are immemorially old and of uncertain origins. By the Middle Ages they were a common instrument, existing in many different forms across europe, and in Asia and north Africa. Played mainly out of doors, and usually by professional players of low status, they are thought to have reached the limits of their popularity in west- ern europe from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth.4 4Baines 1995: 100. 3 COUrTney’S‘UnIOnPIPeS’ AnDTheTerMInOlOgyOFIrIShBellOWS-BlOWnBAgPIPeS The late european innovation of using a bellows worked by the elbow to inflate the bag, instead of using a blow-pipe, probably derived from the medieval use of bellows in portative and other organs, although the principle was known in classical times. Adapted first, presumably, to various kinds of bagpipes which were originally mouth-blown, the use of bellows was crucial in the eventual develop- ment of indoor and socially genteel bagpipes. even more important was the replacing of older chanters (which were loud and of a re- stricted melodic range) with newer chanters (which were quieter and of an extended range), and the concurrent refinement of reeds and drones compatible with these chanters. Bellows bagpipes are attested to in europe from the sixteenth century, although it was the early seventeenth before they came into widespread use. They existed in a great variety of folk and aristocratic forms, large and small, in different countries, and their development was influenced and to some extent driven by the contemporary spread of new popular forms of instruments of extended musical range, such as the recorder, violin, transverse flute and oboe. The first publication on the bellows bag- pipes – a treatise, instruction book and tune book for an instrument with a range just above an octave – was Traité de la Musetteby Pierre Borjon de Scellery, published in lyon in 1672, at a time when musical-instrument makers of the French court had produced a form of bellows bagpipe called a musette du cour(court bagpipe) to cater for a then current aristocratic taste for ‘pastoral’ music.5 In the course of the seventeenth century an awareness of bellows pipes clearly must have arisen in Britain and Ireland through the numerous channels of communication, travel and trade which various parts of both islands always had with the Continent. On each island the earliest 5For bellows pipes generally see Baines 1995: 12–23, 100–28; Kopp 2005: 9–19; Kopp 2011: 243–47. COUrTney’S‘UnIOnPIPeS’ AnDTheTerMInOlOgyOFIrIShBellOWS-BlOWnBAgPIPeS 4 forms of bellows pipes appear to have been in existence by the late seventeenth century,6and to have been subject to processes of develop- ment that continued through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries. Distinct traditions of bellows-pipes manufacture and playing would survive in Scotland, northern england, and Ireland after bag- pipes had fallen out of favour in most of Britain. no early insular makers are known, but the attachment of bellows to existing types of bagpipes, or the importation of a small number of Continental bellows pipes, probably of different kinds, would have been sufficient to set chain reactions in motion among innovative makers. Bellows pipes would always be peripheral instruments in these islands, and would never be played in any great numbers. They would never begin to rival the recorder, violin, german flute or keyboard instruments in popular- ity, and the major music publishers of Britain and Ireland would not publish music or tutors for them as they would for those instruments. But bellows pipes have often been accorded an elite status, specialist publishers have long produced tutors and tune books for them, and they have exerted a persistent, powerful and unique fascination on 6For Britain there is the evidence of the english playwright Thomas Shadwell who in his 1671 play The Humoristsrefers to ‘a Scotch-Bag-Pipe that has got a flaw in the Bellows’ (quoted in Stewart 2009: 53; from Keith Sanger) and that of the english organologist James Talbot who c. 1685–1700 listed ‘Scotch’ bellows bagpipes which he had seen (Cocks 1952: 44–5). In both instances ‘Scotch’ may mean ‘north British’. By the 1720s there is further evidence of various kinds of Scottish and northern english bellows pipes (Sanger 1989: 11–13). The Irish evidence is less explicit, not mentioning bellows until the 1750s, but there are references from the 1680s to bagpipes being played in domestic settings with harp and fiddle and these must have been pipes of the new kind (Carolan 2010: 6–7). larry neal M’elvanna, an ‘Irish piper of note’ who died in Co Down in 1746 in his 78th year, was reported as having learned to play the pipes from Piper Malone of lurgan, ‘who died in 1700 at the advanced age of 100’ (Walker’s Courant, Sept. 1746, quoted in An Píobairevol. 3, no 35, Apr. 1998: 23). By 1746 a noted Irish piper was doubtless a bellows piper. 5 COUrTney’S‘UnIOnPIPeS’ AnDTheTerMInOlOgyOFIrIShBellOWS-BlOWnBAgPIPeS players and listeners here for over three centuries now. They currently enjoy an unprecedented worldwide level of popularity. There is no reason to think that the different insular bellows-pipes traditions did not arise independently of one other, nor is there any evidence that they had an early influence on one other. But in 1743 the first english-language publication on the bellows pipe – The Compleat Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe– alludes to the existence of several contemporary makers of a developing bellows bagpipe.7The instrument was sold in his music shop by John Simpson, the london publisher of the Tutor, and is described in the Tutorby its Irish author John geoghegan; but it is not known whether the makers referred to were British or Irish. geoghegan’s tutor is for a two- octave-plus chromatic bellows pipe with a lowest chanter note of middle C, the second octave achieved by over-blowing (exerting increased air-pressure on the chanter reed by squeezing the bag harder). It is not at all certain that the instrument described by geoghegan is a brand new one, in spite of his title; possibly he had only coined a new marketing term for an established bellows bagpipe.8his book would be obscurely republished and sold into the early nineteenth century in england and Scotland, and possibly sold in Ireland9and the United States10– an indication of the continuing if low-level popularity of the instrument itself, which is now well represented in museum collections. The instrument must have had a general influence on the course of bellows-pipe development in both Britain and Ireland. 7‘This day is publish’d The Complete Tutor for the Pastoral or new Bagpipe... by Mr. John geoghegan...’, Daily Advertiser, london, 29 Sept. 1743 ff. See also Donnelly 2008a: 26–7 for the assignment of this publication to 1743. 8The instrument illustrated in the Tutorclosely resembles one illustrated in a london publication of 1728 (see note 14 below). 9Dennis Connor, a musical-instrument maker and seller of little Christ-Church yard, Dublin, is advertising either ‘bagpipes’ or a tutor for the bagpipes (the wording is ambiguous) in 1759 (Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, Dublin, 17–21 July 1759, see Carolan 2006: 23). 10An anonymous tutor for bagpipes is advertised in Philadelphia in Stephen’s Catalogue of Books etc. for 1795. COUrTney’S‘UnIOnPIPeS’ AnDTheTerMInOlOgyOFIrIShBellOWS-BlOWnBAgPIPeS 6 Introduction of ‘Union Pipes’ long processes of invention and experimentation normally leave no surviving trace before a musical instrument and its terminology emerge onto the public record. This is true of ‘union pipes’. It is not now known for certain who invented the term. But it is known when ‘union pipes’ first emerged onto the public record, and the piper with whom the term was first associated (and who may very well have coined it) is also known. The term is first found on 5 May 1788, in a front-page advertisement in the london newspaper The Worldfor a general concert to be held in the Free Masons’ hall in the city on 14 May: ‘For the Benefit of Mr. Courtenay, Performer on the Union Pipes’.11 Although the venue and the occasion are english, as will be seen below the piper is Irish and his pipes are Irish pipes, and, insofar as it was introduced by him, the term is also Irish. 11earlier instances of the term may yet be discovered. 7 InTrODUCTIOnOF‘UnIOnPIPeS’ ‘Mr. Courtenay’ was the stage name of the professional bellows piper Denis Courtney, an ‘itinerant Irish musician of great fame in the British provinces’.12he was about twenty-eight when he made his first london concert appearance on 14 May 1788, in the company of other very different but well known performers and in what was a leading london music venue. Courtney’s piping quickly became famous in london and he had a somewhat meteoric career before he died there in 1794, in his mid-thirties, of an illness brought on by heavy drinking. long after his death, he was remembered as an out- standing musician. Before Courtney’s debut, no bagpiper of any kind is known to have given a stage recital in london, as distinct from performances in the street and in taverns and ballrooms, from the accompanying of dancers on stage, and from private recitals. Bagpipes had long been generally spoken of in print in Britain, usually in unflattering terms, and in their Scottish forms used to make oblique criticisms of Scottish politicians at Westminster. They were bywords for riot,13drunkenness, low living and noise. nor were Irish pipes exempt from this latter criticism. The Scottish novelist Tobias Smollet compared the piercing singing of a character in his 1751 london novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle to ‘the joint issue of an Irish bag-pipe and a sow gelder’s horn’; this quip was reproduced over and over in contemporary newspapers and magazines. nevertheless there is occasional print evidence of a positive bagpipe subculture in the capital: the publication of the first image of a bellows bagpipe there in 172814and of lancashire bagpipe music in 12highfill et al.: 4, 8. 13Scottish bagpipes had recently been used in london to lead mobs participating in the highly destructive anti-Catholic gordon riots of the summer of 1780 (Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, london, 5 Jan. 1781). 14This important image is part of a burlesque depiction of an ensemble of musicians playing for John gay’s famous 1728 ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera. First COUrTney’S‘UnIOnPIPeS’ AnDTheTerMInOlOgyOFIrIShBellOWS-BlOWnBAgPIPeS 8 1730;15the sale (and probably the manufacture) of bellows bagpipes in 1743, as cited, and in the same year the publication of geoghegan’s tutor-tunebook for them, which includes english, Scottish and Irish tunes; the setting of stage jigs to Irish bagpipe tunes in 1751;16the advertising for ship’s bagpipers in 1768;17the patronage of Scottish highland and Irish bagpipers in the 1770s and 1780s,18and so forth. As the performer who first brought the new term ‘union pipes’ to the public, it is significant that Denis Courtney, in the advertisements for his first london performance, also used an altered stage form of his own surname: ‘Mr Courtenay’. It is not in doubt that his real name, in english, was Courtney.19Of the different forms of surname used for him in print, however, ‘Courtenay’ is not a form of the name found commonly in Ireland, although it was common in the Britain of his time and is of norman-French origin. It was the family name of well known contemporary english aristocrats, earls of Devon, and also the name of a prominent contemporary Westminster politician of Irish birth to whom advertised as a commercial print in The Daily Journal, london, 4 May 1728 (Barlow 2005: 90), the scene was long tentatively believed to have been drawn by William hogarth, and the image has been regarded as evidence of the existence of a bellows pipes in london by the 1720s. But expert opinion now holds the depiction to be the work of a French rather than a British artist; it may in fact therefore reflect a form of the instrument current in contemporary France rather than in Britain (for a discussion see Barlow 2005: 88–91). nevertheless it is inconceivable that bellows-blown bag- pipes were unknown in contemporary london after they had been in existence on the Continent for well over a hundred years. 15‘new Musick. This day publish’d, The Third Book of the Most Celebrated Jigs... with hornpipes the Bagpipe Manner...’, Daily Journal, london, 12 Aug. 1730. 16London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette, london, 12 Sept. 1751. 17Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser, london, 29 June 1768. 18See below. 19Courtney’s first name, age, and the correct form of his surname in english are found in the burial register of Old St Pancras Church, london, where he was interred on 5 Sept. 1794. The register is now in the london Metropolitan Archives. The entry is in accord with other evidence cited below, including notices of Courtney’s death and his date and place of burial in contemporary print sources. 9 InTrODUCTIOnOF‘UnIOnPIPeS’ the piper was once compared.20 ‘Courtney’ on the other hand is a surname common in Ireland, even to the present day, and, as well as also being a form of the norman-French Courtenay there, is an anglicised version of more than one gaelic surname.21Courtney the piper – or his media handler – may have made the change to an almost identical surname that was known and accepted in Britain, one with flatteringly topical and aristocratic overtones. his experiences in the British provinces may have suggested that a slight change in surname for his london launch would be advisable. he may likewise have felt that a name-change would render his Irish pipes more acceptable to the musical public of the metropolis. To understand why Courtney or his promoters may have felt this, it is necessary to know something of the relative positions in 1788 london of Scottish and Irish music; it is mainly within the context of these ethnic musics that the union pipes would have their British future. It was Scottish music that had long been popular in london, in print and on the stage and in general musical culture, not Irish. There had been a certain fashion for Scottish culture in london since the accession of James VI and I to the english throne in 1603, and an increasing number of Scottish melodies were to be found in english publications from the mid-1600s. But in the last fifteen years of the seventeenth century there ‘a liking for Scotch- style music became a positive craze’.22It was a craze that would last for over a hundred years. Chiefly this came about because of the innate attractiveness of Scottish (and faux-Scottish) melodies and songs to the 20John Courtenay, born ‘Courtney’ in Co louth, see Thorne 2004. For the comparison see below. 21The surname Courtney is found in various parts of Ireland but principally clusters in Kerry and adjoining counties and in southern Ulster. In gaelic it is Ó Curnáin, Mac Cuarta, etc. (Maclysaght 1996: 65). 22Fiske 1983: 5. See Fiske for a detailed discussion of Scottish music in eighteenth- century england.