h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Irish pipes, Shakespeare and Grattan Flood - A53246153
Author: Recumbentman - U208656

A curiosity.

Interesting entry and as I love Uilleann pipes I couldn't resist the heading.
Would it be worth putting a few links to some of the better known players like the sublimely talented Liam O'Flynn and probably some links to the Easter Uprising, Irish history etc.

Hey old pedlar - good to hear from you.

I'm afraid I'm not a fan of Northumbrian pipes, and these seem to be the same sort of thing, but as we don't have audio on h2g2 that's irrelevent.

Otherwise, it's short, but I prefer pithy to verbiage, so that's not a problem.

As I said before, it's a good Entry, R.

You say that the "union" of union pipes is not anything to do with the Act of Union. Is it true that it is from the union of three different types of pipe in one instrument? Can you mention this, or whatever the reason is.

When you've said all that it is sensible to say on a topic...Stop! Length is no measure of quality.

Good to see you submitting to PR again Recumbentman

Thank you folks.

G, I don't want to go into details because for one thing it seems to be still uncertain what the name is supposed to mean, and for another, there is room for a dedicated entry on uilleann pipes (if there isn't one already) but I don't really want to get into that.

The uilleann pipes are more sophisticated than the deliciously gentle Northumbrian pipes, in having not only a chanter and drones but also regulators, that is, keys to be depressed by the wrist which engage extra drones that can be combined to form chords.

If it's not clear where "union" comes from, is there a possibility that Grattan Flood was right?

Of course there is a possibility, in fact the OED is with Grattan Flood (modified by a question mark).

No entry under uilleann pipes, but under union pipes they give:

[Etymology:] ? ad. Ir. píob uilleann, f. píob pipe + uilleann, gen. sing. of uille elbow.

A form of bagpipes in which the wind-bag is inflated by bellows worked by the elbow; Irish bagpipes.

1851-61 MAYHEW Lond. Labour III. 163/1 The union pipes are the old Irish pipes improved. 1877 R. BELL Early Ballads, etc. 441 We first heard it sung in Malhamdale, Yorkshire, by..an old Dales'-minstrel, who accompanied himself on the union-pipes. [end quote]

-- but the probability is greatly reduced by the consideration that the name 'píob uilleann' does not (apparently) occur in Irish, before Grattan Flood.

Interesting to note that while OED gives 1851 as the first citation for 'union pipes' in English literature, Grove cites a 'tutor for the union pipes' published in London c1746. It was called 'The Compleat Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe' which has nothing Irish on the face of it . . . but it was written by one J. Geoghegan. The next book cited in Grove is 'O'Farrell's Collection of National Irish Music for the Union Pipes' published in 1804 (when the Act of Union was new). We'll have to look harder at Geoghegan and see whether he uses the term union; if he does, that kills the Act of Union connection, as that act was only contemplated towards the end of the 18th cent.

Anyway, Grove, whose authority in music overrides OED, says

[quote] The Irish union pipe [. . . ] was stated by Flood (who insisted on the mock-Gaelic term 'uilleann pipe') to have been introduced about 1588, but he gave no authority for the statement. [end quote]

Certainly the bellows-blown pipe was current in Shakespeare's lifetime, being illustrated in Praetorius's Syntagma Musicum in 1618.

What on earth did Shakespeare mean when he got Shylock to say (in justification of his whim to claim his pound of flesh rather than the money)

Some men there are love not a gaping pig;
Some that are mad if they behold a cat;
And others, when the bagpipe sings i' th' nose,
Cannot contain their urine [. . .]
As there is no firm reason to be rend'red
Why he cannot abide a gaping pig;
Why he, a harmless necessary cat;
Why he, a woollen bagpipe, but of force
Must yield to such inevitable shame
As to offend, himself being offended

Now from this context, the woollenness is one of a list of harmless qualities -- he can't stand bagpipes even though they are woollen, which I would therefore take to mean either 'soft and pliable' (the bag) or 'gentle-sounding' or even perhaps 'swollen', nothing to do with fabric at all.

OED files this Shakespeare quote under meaning c. of 'woollen':

Silent, as if padded with wool: said of the feet or footsteps. Obs.
After L. pedes laneos or lanatos habere, ‘to have woollen feet’, to walk silently, to move unperceived.

--but again retreat by saying:

¶The allusion in the foll. quot. is uncertain.

1596 SHAKES. Merch. V. IV. i. 56 There is no firme reason..Why he cannot abide a gaping Pigge?.. Why he a woollen bag-pipe. [See 1876 STAINER & BARRETT Dict. Mus. Terms 43/2 s.v. Bagpipe.]

Geoghegan is available as a pdf here http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/musicfiles/manuscripts/geoghegan.pdf

and at first glance he doesn't seem to use the word union. Wikky says of what Geoghegan called the Pastoral "As it developed into the Union pipe in the period 1770-1830, makers in all three countries"--England, Ireland, and Scotland--"contributed ideas and design improvements". Now the Act of Union of Scotland and England dates from 1707, and Ireland was unonised in 1801, so there seems after all a distinct possibility that that political union was intentionally referred to in the name union pipes.

I'm momentarily speechless...

This is one of the oddest constructions I have come across and I'm truly impressed.

Why, for the sheer perpendicularity of its component parts, I've never seen the beat.

It may be the literary equivalent of a tensegrity - where it starts out mashed flat but has enough elasticity in its connections that it snaps-to when the pressure is released.

In case you've invented a new form, I think you ought to call it recumbivert.



(oh, and I wouldn't change a word of it)

Thank you Pailaway, for your generous and beautiful endorsement

Thank you also Keith -- but I think I won't be mentioning Liam or any other pipers -- and thank you McKay, h5ringer and Gnomon. No can-opening, I'll leave this piece as it is if I may. Might even remove the footnote on Chauvin; people can google him for themselves.

I did have the pleasure of accompanying Liam O'Flynn once. He played in the Flagmount festival while I was running a music school in Clare, and my Clare Orchestra did something with him. Strangely, I can't remember what. Can you credit that? My mind must have been in overload all those years--that was the nineties, before I took refuge in the sanity of hootoo.

OK, I can't leave well enough alone; I've added in a few extra notes and stuff. I'm reading Geoghegan's 1746 tutor and hoping I don't find anything interesting there.

Nothing there about the name. Interesting collection of tunes: the first is 'A Scotch Measure', then a 'Jigg, call'd Whip her and gird her', 'A Charming Nun to a Fryar came', 'Tweed Side', 'The Dying Swan', Gahagan's Frish', 'The Mamina' (which resembles a polka), and so on. There is 'A Bagpipe Concerto call'd the Battle of Aghrem or the Football March' which pays dubious respect to the battle of Aughrim, when William beat James on the 12th of July 1691 . . . the piece is not a tune but a fanfare (unaccompanied), not unlike many 'hunt' pieces. Other Irish allusions are 'The Humours of Westmeath', 'Blind Paddy's Fancy', and 'Castle Barr'. There is a 'Welsh Fair' and plenty of English things like 'The Red Lyon Hornpipe', 'Ravenscroft's Fancy', 'The King's Head', 'Portsmouth Harbour', and 'Paddington Pound' (no resemblance to the Elizabethan Packington's Pound).

There is even 'New York, a Hornpipe'. I'm not sure what to make of 'Thump the Bitches' . . .

A few more corrections and expansions have now gone in. I've tracked down Grattan Flood's Dowland article, and I may get to look at it in TCD Library next week. So far I'm going on hearsay (my philosophy professor in TCD told me the story).

It's a fascinating account you have here. And beautifully constructed.

Could I ask you to change the special characters into HTML entities, because they're showing up as funny question marks in my browser.

á

TRiG.

Thanks for telling me that, Trig. I use the Irish-English keyboard (as you probably do yourself) which gives me an accented a if I hit AltGr+a and so on. I'll put them all into á form now (or shortly).

Thanks also for your kind comment.

Done. Just got to get to a copy of The Gentleman's Magazine 1906 now.

Cans of damn worms!

I went and looked at the Gentleman's Magazine, and also at another source quoted by Grattan Flood as the origin of the term 'Ullan pipes' in 1786. Very interesting . . . but calls for a rewrite, so the entry is out of review for a while.

Looking forward to it!

h2g2's pages are encoded in the Latin-1 encoding, which doesn't include all the diacritics. So when you put in special letters they aren't actually accurate. The code points don't, technically, mean anything. Some browsers will try to guess what they mean (and usually guess them correctly), while others won't bother.

Best not to use these letters.

TRiG.

There must be some way round this?