The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #20632   Message #833936
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
24-Nov-02 - 01:09 PM
Thread Name: Bagpipes in America
Subject: RE: MusicalBS: Bagpipes in America
I think you'd call them by the Irish word for bagpipes; or just pipes, which is what they were called until the bellows-blown version arrived in Ireland. Grattan Flood adduced no evidence for the existence of the term uilleann in reference to pipes, beyond Shakespeare's reference to "woollen pipes" (in The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, scene 1, line 55); since this was written a century or more before the first appearance of bellows pipes, any connection to Irish pipes is very unlikely; it is generally considered nowadays that the reference is either to the covering of the bag, or an example of a (now obsolete) use of the word to mean "rustic". The latter may be most likely.

At all events, scholars of Irish music such as Breandan Breathnach hav e long dismissed Grattan Flood's claims as mere unsubstantiated fantasy; though it is far too late to stop people using the term uilleann; wrong though it certainly is, the world is stuck with it. It hardly matters, so long as people don't try to draw conclusions from it.