Pastoral pipes

Did You Know?

• Pastoral pipes with removable foot joints were still being made until the 1850s and played until after the First World War.
• The term 'uilleann' originated in 1904, used by Irish nationalists.

History

The pastoral pipe was played in the Lowlands of Scotland, Northern England, and Ireland from the mid-18th until the early 20th century. It preceded the uilleann pipes, and makers worked in London, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dublin, and Newcastle upon Tyne, making it difficult to assign a single country of origin. The earliest known piping tunebook, Geoghegan's Compleat Tutor, references a London maker in 1746. The instrument evolved into the union pipe between 1770 and 1830, with makers in Scotland, England, and Ireland contributing design improvements.

Both pipes were played by gentlemen pipers in Scotland, England, and Anglo-Irish Protestant circles in Ireland—people who could afford an expensive hand-made set. The term "new bagpipe" refers to the expanded compass and improvements. The label "pastoral" is not historically found outside Geoghegan's London context but evokes the style of music played at the time, possibly referring to "ancient pastoral airs" composed in a gentle, sweet manner imitating shepherds' music.

This style suited the sweet tone of the late-18th-century pipes, when art and literature romanticized rural life. The pastoral bagpipe may have been invented by an expert maker targeting the Romantic market.

Tuning

For a long time, people thought the pastoral pipes were hard to switch between low and high notes. But recent work rebuilding and fixing old instruments has shown that isn’t true. On modern uilleann pipes, a player moves up an octave by briefly blocking the chanter while squeezing the bag harder, which makes the reed jump to a higher tone. On the pastoral pipe, the same jump happens just by increasing bag pressure while playing a specific gracenote.

For instance, to go from low A to high A, you can use an E gracenote. Old pastoral pipe music books are full of tunes that leap around between octaves. Blocking the chanter does help, though, because it lets the player lift and lower the chanter off the knee to control volume, giving better dynamics. This might be why the union pipe evolved, by removing the foot joint from the pastoral pipe.

The pastoral pipe’s chanter had a narrow throat bore of 3.5 to 4 mm and an exit bore rarely bigger than 11 mm, very similar to early 18th-century flat-set union pipe chanters. Its reeds had heads 9.5 to 10.5 mm wide and staple bores of 3.6 mm. Chanters came in several pitches, with a soft tone, and E flat was common among surviving examples. Later versions added a slide on the foot joint to switch the low leading note between flat and sharp.

One set even has an on/off switch for the drones, with two regulators fitted neatly on top of the common stock, plus an E key to extend the chanter’s range in the second octave.

Chanter

The melody on a pastoral pipe is played by its chanter, which sounds much like the later flat-set union pipe chanters. This chanter has eight finger holes and uses open fingering in its first register to produce middle C, D, E, F♯, G, A, B, and either C or C♯, D'. Cross-fingering can produce most accidentals, while a second register is reached by squeezing the bag harder. With the right reed, a few notes in the third octave are also possible. Later versions of the instrument added up to seven keys for fully chromatic playing. The chanter’s reed is a complex double-bladed type, like an oboe or bassoon reed, and must be made to play two full octaves in tune using only bag pressure and fingering, since the player cannot adjust pitch with their lips.

Instrument makers of the pastoral and Union pipes

The oldest surviving pastoral pipes date from the 1770s to the 1790s, with examples by James Kenna, Hugh Robertson, and Robert Reid. Makers then adapted the instrument to be played on the knee instead of off it, which improved dynamic control. Players may have split into two groups: union pipers who dropped the foot joint, and pastoral pipers who kept it and could play both ways. Both long and short chanters for these pipes were found in Scotland and Ireland up to the First World War. The development of union and uilleann pipes was shaped by rivalry between makers in Aberdeen, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Newcastle, who borrowed ideas from one another.