John Geoghegan published The Compleat Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe in London in 1743 (also discussed in an earlier post). He described its chanter by comparison with the oboe, illustrating that instrument on the final page of the book.
The cited copy does not have a frontispiece but the one in another copy shows the bagpipes.
This instrument has three drones but the one described in the text has two. Additional illustrations include a fingering chart for the basic diatonic scale, and another that adds accidentals to it. The expanded chart prescribes the same fingerings for adjacent sharps and flats, except for A♯ and B♭. Geoghegan expressed the hope that this approach to tuning would “not be unacceptable to the profesers of this ancient pastoral musick or to the makers of the instrument,” thereby suggesting that it differed from the established system(s) of his day.
I have made this scale so as to explain the Manner of makeing all the Flats and Sharps, Independant of any Keys… In this scale it must be observ’d that over D sharp the note E is mark’d flat so as to indicate that they are both perform’d in one and the same manner, likewise Alamire flat [i.e., A flat] is perform’d in the same manner with G sharp and it must be notic’d in the scale that over G sharp in the place of A there is a mark ♭ to signify that A flat is the same with G sharp.
Geoghegan used the word “keys” earlier in his text to label the physical keys on a bagpipe chanter that he had not seen (possibly the musette de cour discussed in another previous post, which contributed heavily to the designs under present consideration). In the cited snippet, that word can either be read in the same sense, or to designate musical keys. His own chanter is keyless and the chart prescribes the same fingering for all but one of the paired sharps and flats.
This “enharmonic equivalence” is a characteristic of equal temperament, in which a given interval has the same size in all keys. If Geoghegan’s tuning system is treated literally, it can be classified as a modified equal temperament, differing from the strict 12-tone form by separate pitches for the A♯ and B♭, rather than a single shared one. The same system appeared a half century later in a Méthode nouvelle et raisonnée pour le hautbois (“New and reasoned method for the oboe”) published in Paris in 1792.
The Irish “union pipes” emerged during the interval between these two publications. The tuning of its chanter can therefore plausibly have been conceptualized in the same manner. The earliest published fingering chart explicitly for it appeared near the end of the century, in an undated edition of O’Farrell’s Collection of National Irish Music for the Union Pipes (citing a transcription by Francis O’Neill). As with Geoghegan’s chart, a single fingering is given for each enharmonic pair, but O’Farrell made no exception for A♯/B♭.
The first attested reference to the union pipes is in a newspaper advertisement dated 5 May 1788 for a concert to be held nine days later at the Mason’s Hall in London, “for the benefit of Mr. Courtenay, performer on the union pipes.” Nicholas Carolan details this in an article that includes facsimiles of both the advertisement and the following engraving of Mr. Courtenay (the stage name of Denis Courtney), from 1793. The pantomime Oscar & Malvina cited in the caption, premiered at Covent Garden in 1791.
There is little difference between these union pipes and the pastoral pipes illustrated above. Courteney’s drones are configured distinctively, with what appear as two short drones possibly being a single longer one folded through the stock. The chanter has a long bell and there are no regulators (closed pipes with keys) nor would the depicted playing position permit their use.
The concert cited above, where Courtney and his instrument made their first documented performance, was reviewed the following day in the London Times (the source of this post’s banner image). It is likely that Courtney coined the term union pipes and may well have explained it to the audience. If so, and his definition propagated into the review, he would have introduced his performance by explaining that the instrument was “called the Union Pipes, being the Scotch and Irish Bagpipes united.”
Courtney was born in Ireland ca. 1760. This is also the estimated date of a set of Irish bagpipes with a short chanter and single regulator (possibly the prototypal such device), made by James Kenna. It is played here by its current owner, Ronan Browne.
He comments further on them in a second video, here, and has explained his approach to tuning to me in personal communication. He regards the Irish bagpipes as ideally suited to a native Irish scale, with equal temperament fundamentally antithetical to both. The first tune demonstrating this perspective here, Hunting the Squirrel, appears in a compilation published ca. 1759.
Although again pure coincidence, this was as close as can be to the time of Courtney’s birth. His attitude toward tuning would obviously have reflected the traditional Irish musical aesthetic during the years when he acquired his skill as a piper. However, as with any other professional instrumentalist in an ensemble context, Courtney would have conformed as far as possible to its consensus tuning.
The tune singled out in the review of his London debut concert, Maggie Lawder, appears untitled in a keyboard score with selections from Oscar & Malvina, published in 1791. It is one of two pieces labeled for the pipes and harp. The other starts with the traditional tune Kempshot Hunt, and names the players of the two instruments. It specifies both Courtney as the piper and the union pipes as his instrument. (I’ll devote a separate post to Mr. Meyer and the type of harp he played, revisiting Maggie Lawder as well; ETA – now online here.)
The chords in the part for union pipes might be seen as evidence of the instrument having two regulators but the key change at the start of the third system would require an uncorroborated chromatic configuration. The chords are more likely to be an artifact of the keyboard reduction, but the long D preceding the cadenza exceeds the sustain time of a harpsichord or wooden-framed piano. This indicates what would indeed be a transcription of a performance on bagpipes. The D♯ near the end of the cadenza, taken with the E♭ in the key signature, illustrate the enharmonic concern that runs through this entire discussion.
The organist Catherine Ennis – daughter of the legendary uilleann piper Seamus Ennis – and Liam O’Flynn to whom he was a mentor, compare the 18th-century oboe with the chanter of present-day pipes in the following performance.
Ennis plays a modern concert hall organ, tuned to equal temperament. This was not a widely accepted tuning system for the organs and other keyboard instruments in the day of George Frederick Handel (1685–1759), the composer of this piece. A number of alternative temperaments were in use, all favoring the largest possible number of pure intervals over the ability to play in all keys.
In Germany, where Handel began his musical education, church organs were commonly tuned to a system that prioritizes pure major thirds, termed “quarter-comma meantone temperament” (or simply meantone). This is demonstrated on a copy of an organ from ca. 1700. Its keyboard has more than 12 keys per octave, using so-called “split-sharps” to avoid need for selecting one of the two candidate notes for a given black key, or a compromise tuning between them.
Ennis and O’Flynn add drones to the chanter in another test of the compatibility of uilleann pipes with an equally tempered organ. This performance is of the slow air Easter Snow.
A further tuning system called “just intonation” includes pure perfect fifths with the pure major thirds of meantone, but there are severe constraints on its practical applicability. It has both a “major (or greater) whole tone” and a “minor (or lesser) whole tone” of appreciably different sizes. (The “meantone” lies between them.) This means that if mapped to a conventional piano keyboard, problems arise with the tuning of the white keys, not just the black ones. For example, the D a pure perfect fifth above G differs in pitch from the D a pure perfect fifth below A. If the I, IV, and V chords in C major are tuned with pure thirds and fifths, modulating no farther than to its dominant key of G major would require tolerating a severely out of tune V chord there.
The definition of just intonation used in analytical discourse about tuning systems is derived from simple numerical relationships in the harmonic series. However, the term is also used colloquially as a designation for intonation that in one way or another is purer than equal temperament. The tuning of uilleann pipes is often conceptualized in a sense straddling these definitions, as in a discussion of regulators by Geoff Wooff here, who subsequently clarified that just intonation is not appropriate for the chanter here.
One of the online comments about the preceding performance asserts that “uilleann pipes are tuned according to just tuning. Equal temperament would make your teeth grate every time the piper played a third against the drones.” If so, there is no reason why the same effect would not beset that performance via the organ alone.
Padraig McGovern plays one of Handel’s best-known instrumental works (initially scored for two oboes and strings) solo on the uilleann pipes in the following video. Its modulation through three keys overburdens the capacity of just intonation in precisely the regard noted three paragraphs above. This also applies to the piece from Oscar & Malvina.
McGovern brings the same adroit use of the regulators to Easter Snow. There is perceptible variation in the size of nominally identical intervals in the chords produced when the regulators are added to the drones and chanter, also ruling out equal temperament.
The pianist Ryan Molloy accompanies McGovern on yet another recording of Easter Snow, from an album titled Tempered. On it, he pairs his instrument with several sets of uilleann pipes with their own specific tunings. The piano is re-tuned to each, to provide a better match to it than equal temperament does.
In the companion booklet Molloy remarks:
From their elevated position as the quintessential solo instrument in traditional Irish music, the uilleann pipes have no need for accompaniment, making their own colourful and self-sufficient musical world through the use of drones and regulators. This self-contained soundworld allows them to be more closely in tune with themselves rather than having to tune with a range of other instruments, such as the piano is expected to do across the full range of major and minor keys. The latter necessitates an ‘averaged’ tuning known as equal temperament which differs from the pipes’ unique temperament(s). The result of this difference is that the combination of piano and uilleann pipes hasn’t been a hugely successful one in the history of both instruments, often creating a timbral or harmonic clash between them.
The idea behind this album was to try to bridge this gap somewhat by delving into the nuances of tuning that give each set of pipes its characteristic colour. With this information, I was able to use digital sampling software (Ivory II) to individually control the tuning of each note on the piano such that it more closely matches that of the pipes. In doing so, I ended up down a rabbit-hole of myriad eighteenth-century tunings, from meantone temperaments to tunings developed by the organ builder Gottfried Silbermann and music theorist Georg Andreas Sorge.
These temperaments are not detailed further but in response to a personal communication asking about where on that spectrum of tuning systems the recording of Easter Snow was to be found, Molloy told me that to the best of his present recollection, it was Silbermann-Sorge (also forwarding the tuning table he used for it on the recording).
Sorge published a description of that temperament in 1748, in an analysis of selected tuning systems titled, Gespräch zwischen einem Musico theoretico und einem Studioso Musices (“Dialog between a music theoretician and a music student”). He was critical of the way the organ builder Gottfried Silbermann tuned his instruments and based the temperament now bearing both of their names on it.
This book continued a dialog that Sorge initiated in the more fundamental, Anweisung zur Stimmung und Temperatur sowohl der Orgelwerke, als auch anderer Instrumente, sonderlich des Claviers (“Instructions for the tuning and temperament of organs, as well as other instruments, particularly keyboards”), published in 1744. He began it by acknowledging the allure of just intonation, but proceeded with a demonstration of its impossibility, first in narrative terms and then mathematically.
…if, for example, one wishes all fifths and thirds to be tuned pure, which is very pleasing to the ear, it will soon be realized that this service cannot be provided…
Sorge’s answer to his student’s question, “What is the situation with flutes and oboes?,” was that they (including both the recorder and transverse flute) have varying capability for dynamically adjusting pitch during performance but that this was insufficient for offsetting the suboptimal temperaments currently built into such instruments. (Fingering charts from that time typically prescribe chromatic semitones that are smaller than diatonic semitones – A♯ is lower than B♭ – placing them in the generalized meantone camp.)
The 1748 book includes a commentary on equal temperament, which Sorge felt was far from ready for general acceptance. Nonetheless, at least from the theoretical perspective, there was “absolutely none better.” He also cited an earlier author’s appraisal of its ambivalent musical value (Johan Georg Neidhardt in 1732).
Equal temperament thus carries along its convenience and inconvenience, just as the beloved state of matrimony.