Subject: RE: Ullean Pipes
From:
Nerd
Date: 08 Sep 03 - 03:11 PM
Sorefingers,
Your hysterical response to my previous post suggests that I am foolish to attempt this, but here I go.
My credentials include a doctorate in folklore, training in anthropology, archaeology and ethnomusicology, as well as one book and hundreds of articles about Celts, ancient and modern, including music. I am neither English nor Scottish, as you seem to think, nor am I an apologist for English policies in Ireland. I am also not Irish (which I believe makes me more objective in this than you) I have harbored a lifelong love of Irish people, culture, music, etc.
As I said before, and as you were unable to refute except to shrilly assert that you knew more than I, there is NO EVIDENCE that any kind of bagpipe accompanied Celts in their migration from Spain to Ireland. (I assure you, you do not know more about this than me, because there is nothing to know. There is no evidence. Unless you can cite a viable source?)
2. You say that "The idea of a Parlour in an Irish Mudcottage of the period is as credible as indoor plumbing in a Scottish Mudcottage of same the period..." is essentially correct. But I did not say there were parlours in mudcottages. I said the Uillean pipes were a parlor instrument. This means that they were designed to be played indoors. They were also, incidentally, designed for the middle classes, not the poor, who rarely have innovative products aimed at them. Anyone who has bought a new set of Uillean pipes should be able to guess that the inhabitant of a mudcottage living on subsistence farming and/or wages could not afford one. Laboring people got their pipes (like most of their fiddles and 8-key and Boehm system wooden flutes) secondhand from middle class people, so these instruments were not designed specifically for their lifestyle. They were parlor intstruments removed from the parlor.
3. Even if I am wrong about the banning of piping in England (and I believe that the evidence in all these cases is frequently overstated), this does not disprove my point, which was that bellows-blown pipes were developed in places where piping was NOT banned, such as France. Thus to assert that the move to a smaller, quieter, bellows-blown pipe was necessarily a reaction to the banning of piping is bad logic. Can you point to a historical document such as a diary or letter in which a pipemaker writes "in order to avoid prosecution under the new anti-rioting laws, I am creating a smaller, quieter bagpipe"? I think not. Which means from the perspective of a historian of any nationality, there is NO EVIDENCE that this was the impetus behind the development of the Uillean pipes.
4. You mock my statement that the idea of using a bellows to blow a bagpipe does not SEEM to have been Irish in origin. I used this phrasing not because I do not the evidence, but because evidence in matters like this is almost never conclusive. From the best evidence available, this was a French innovation. But obviously fresh evidence would require a reassessment of this position.
I find it amusing that you take an absence of maniacal devotion to a position to be evidence for a weak argument. In fact it is because, contrary to your belief, I have no agenda in this. In archaeology and musicology as in all things, we build our theories around the available facts, we do not create facts to fit our theories. If you show me evidence of an Irish bellows-blown bagpipe that predates the earliest French evidence I'll gladly change my opinion.
But, like they say in my neighborhood, I ain't holding my breath!
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sj
