I haven’t posted around here for ages due to things like…almost dying.
Anyway - that old chestnut. Uilleann or union.
Most people accept that the original name of the pipes was union, and that uilleann is a more modern invention.
I was messing around with google book’s ngram viewer, which allows you graph the frequency of words over time in the google books collection. It seems to support that naming theory.
It is interesting that if you change the language between British and American English, the peak is in the 1970-1980s for British.
How accurate it is, I don’t know, but it is fun to mess around with the viewer.
There’s no mention of ‘uilleann pipe’ in the Google sources until Grattan Flood’s “The Story of the Bagpipe” in 1911 (though Flood was arguing for the term from as early as 1890, it seems [Carolan, see link below]). Flood’s assertion that ‘uilleann’ was the original name for the instrument has since been thoroughly discredited - in fact it comes from an earlier, but also discredited, source (below). You will note that even after Flood’s book, it was a couple of decades before the “new”/“old” term caught on, and even longer among the American piping community. Google Ngrams does illustrate this well, though I wouldn’t rely on it for complete coverage (yet) as there are loads of things Google hasn’t digitized yet (gasp!).
The apparent source for the ‘uilleann’ coinage is Charles Vallancey (again an ‘unreliable’ source) was an informant to Joseph Cooper Walker, who was researching a book on Irish music which was published in 1786. Vallancey refers to “Irish pipes filled at the elbow or ‘Uilean’” and both ‘ullan’ and ‘cuisle’ as terms for the Irish pipes This is thought to be speculation on Vallancey’s part “motivated by a wish to make a connection with the ‘woollen pipes’ of Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice.” (Carolan, see link below). Perhaps we should be calling them “Cuisle Pipes” ? In any case, if either of these names was a vernacular name for the instrument, it was not recorded in print in contexts other than regurgitations of Walker’s text, who had gotten it from Vallancey, until after the cause was taken up by Flood.
What may also be interesting is that the probable objection to the term “Union”, besides the desire for an Irish name for the instrument, was the association with the (widely despised) Act of Union (Ireland) 1800. It has been shown that the term ‘Union Pipes’ was in use prior to this act, but the Google Ngram viewer doesn’t show that, as it doesn’t yet include the London newspaper “The World”, in which the term appeared in print in 1788. See Nicolas’ Carolan’s article on the term and the pipes, available in PDF form here: http://www.itma.ie/images/uploads/unionpipes.pdf
Welcome back, Mukade, and I am glad that you are in better health!
I’ve read that ‘uilleann’ is a genitive singular form of the Irish word that means or meant both ‘union’ and ‘elbow’. (I would guess that ‘uilleann’ denotes or denoted ‘union’ in general and in the latter specifically indicated the joint or “union” of the two parts of the arm.) If so, this coincidence was certainly favorable (luck of the Irish?) to promote ‘uilleann’ over ‘union’ not only to avoid association with the politically undesirable connotations of ‘union’, but to shift focus on how these pipes are played, i.e., with a bellows attached near the elbow. (I’m only conjecturing about how the shift from ‘union’ to ‘uilleann’ may have occurred, not saying that ‘uilleann’ was original.)
In his autobiography, the Cork author, Frank O’Connor, devotes a few pages to the increased cultural consciousness in Ireland in the wake of the Easter Rising. He mentions a concert at which the Foxchase was played on th “elbow pipes”. It might be that he used “elbow” instead of uilleann because he was writing for a predominantly American readership, but he certainly avoided “union”.
Might have something to do with cuisle meaning “vein” in Modern Irish. Let us explore this: “Vein pipes” is kind of a tautology, not to mention icky, but on the other hand you have the…wait for it…venous fleadh-trap.
Don’t forget about the bucolic pipes they predate Union pipes.
A narrower search term results here, the term Uilleann pipes to just Uilleann being Gaelic and pipe not, the word Uilleann will still appear in musical “pipe” context as it doesn’t make much sense being printed in English books otherwise. The other term I threw in is the Gaelic word pìobaireachd (no results whatsover) means pipe music along with a Historic Irish language manuscript Lebor na hUidre.
Something else worth noting the Union pipe is surely referenced quite early in search time scale (1830) so considering Penal Laws lasted from about 1700 – 1829 there was a lot of Irish folk didn’t getting to do much in the reading/writing, learning department but they would still have had language. Forty years later circa 1870 the first reference to Uilleann and Lebor na hUidre is visible in the time line, by widening the time scale to include the 1700’s and you get this result … just my 2 bobs worth.
Thoughts…..given the historical dating for the development of these pipes, i.e. c1700, there are other factors we should consider. Development took place initially in London it is thought, then makers are noted in Edinborough and, I believe, Glasgow.
Ireland at the time still had a strong presence of the English ruling class. It is here we must consider language. Ullans is the Scots dialect spoken in Northern Ireland. If these instruments travelled across the water from SW Scotland, (only 23 miles, there was lots of trade back and forth), and were heard in N.I. they might have been called ullans because of the language spoken by the players. Alternativly they may have been called Lallens, the Scots word for Lowlands, where they were being developed.
Bearing in mind that the codified spelling assocoiated with the dictionary was not yet in full use, it is a small step from hearing the word ullan, or lallan, and recording the word uilleann. The fact that they are bellows blown just may have worked towards that development.
This thread seems to have turned into a soup of speculation. The best and most thorough scholarship maintains that ‘uilleann’ is a modern appropriation, and there is no evidence that the Irish pipes were called ‘uilleann’ pipes, or anything similar, by actual players of the instrument prior to Flood taking up Vallency’s banner.
It cannot be proven that ‘uilleann’, ‘ullan’, etc. was not an ancient name for the instrument, but there is no evidence for it - therefore it is pure speculation. Now, as then, there are those who would like to believe in one or another theory, but such a belief is not evidence-based. On the other hand, there is firm evidence that the name ‘union pipes’ was the common name for the instrument (in its post-Pastoral form) in the early period. The other name recorded in this period is “Irish bagpipe”, though this does not mean that the earliest examples were necessarily made in Ireland - only that the instrument was associated with Ireland from an early date.
Dave’s date of c1700 does not apply to the union pipes, and it is early even for the Pastoral pipes from which they are believed to have developed.
Lots of speculations about the origin of “Union Pipes”. Here is one more:
In that period (~1740 - ~1800) London was the place “to be”. It was where “things happened”. The “Folk-Scene” and the continental baroque scene met. Geoghan and O´Farrel were “attracted” but also Händel and other baroque composers. “Folk” of course not in a musical but in a lyrical sense. The “Ossian” stories were “en vogue”, e. g.. “Musicals” had to be composed to entertain the masses (lack of TV-shows or Hollywood movies ). What was missing however was an instrument that was associated with this folk culture (a bagpipe - a “new” bagpipe), but the loudness had to be adequate to play in “union” with other instruments without “suffocating” them AND being able to play in a wider range than just the octave.
This is no differenciation between Pastoral Pipes and “Irish” Pipes yet!
As you may know, the softer, large range, Baroque Musette had been a regular member of the (formative) orchestra under Lully, when ‘pastoral’ was the buzzword. We can most certinaly look at the baroque musette’s chalumeau as the prototype for uilleann(union ) regulators.So, the idea wasnt really ‘new’, certainly was in existence for several generations prior, but rather (to Londoners) perhaps merely…foreign. 1740-1800 IIRC, was a transitional period in music history that actually saw the decline of the high baroque concept, with the sons of Bach (J. Christoff in London, of course) breaking ground into what we look at today as ‘classical’, Haydn, Mozart. What a pity, ive always thought, the Mannheim school had no time for those quaint, funky little bag things.
I’d like to get into it further, but theres a Grace Kelly marathon on Comcast.
Priorities, & all that.
Dunno, I thought that N Carolan’s well-researched paper on “Courtney’s Union Pipes” had pretty much got to the bottom of this old “uilleann / union” chestnut by actually going and looking at the sources.
As has been pointed out there’s a lot of speculation floating around the above thread.
Yes, but the real question is when did this thread start to be speculative. It may have been when Dan mentioned the genitive case, or when I referred to Frank O’Connor, or indeed …
In all seriousness, I thought that Mukade’s original question was not just about what the original name was but how it changed to what most now use. I certainly wouldn’t argue with Mr. Haneman’s presentation of facts about which came first but I am still very curious about whether the shift from ‘union’ to ‘uilleann’ first came from the equivalent translation of the English ‘union’ into Irish ‘uilleann’, then a reinterpretation of it to a secondary meaning (‘elbow’) to avoid the despised primary meaning (‘union’). If so, this would be a linguistic coincidence that’d be up there with Красная площадь having changed its original meaning of ‘Beautiful Square’ to ‘Red Square’ just in time for the October Revolution!1
(1) The original Russian word for red was червонный, from червь ‘worm’, the cochineal insect from which crimson dyes were made (most other Slavic languages still use the relative form for ‘red’, e.g., Bulgarian червен). (Interestingly, English [from French] ‘vermilion’ has the same etymology.) Красный meant ‘beautiful’ and the Slavs have always been mighty fond of the color red, so…
Larry Grogan was supposedly the first noted player of these pipes, and he died 1728/9, accoring to Sean Donnelly’s fine biography of him. Instrument makers would have been exploring this chanter for a while. To become a recognised and noted player would take some 7-10 years, so maybe 1717 when Grogan started.
Did he teach himself?
Did he find an instrument maker with an idea and work with him?
As for the Courtny article, the contemporary pics shows him play with drones vertical ,while the drones shown by Hogarth at a similar time shows drones in a low position, but played standing. http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/8985
This is the Beggars Opera, first perfomed in 1728.
So i would say c1700 on for these pipes, but it is unlikely we will ever really know.
). What was missing however was an instrument that was associated with this folk culture (a bagpipe - a “new” bagpipe), but the loudness had to be adequate to play in “union” with other instruments without “suffocating” them AND being able to play in a wider range than just the octave.
