The Real Alternatives
Terry Moylan
A review of two new piping albums.
The Poet & The Piper – Seamus Heaney and Liam O’Flynn (Claddagh CCT21CD)
Live Recordings from the William Kennedy Piping Festival – Various (Armagh Pipers Club WKPFCD001)
Pre-Famine Ireland, according to the cliché, had a piper in every parish. Surprisingly, this is a testable claim. The number of parishes in Ireland, north and south, comes to around 2,500. Na Píobairí Uilleann has compiled a computerised archive of references in the literature to named pipers throughout Irish history. This yields a total of between 2,000 and 2,500 distinct names. Remember that this is covering at least six generations in some detail, with a smattering of references dating back to earlist times. It’s not a great fit, but taken with the constant references to (un-named) pipers in nineteenth-century Irish literature, it does seem as if pipers were almost as common then ‘as people are in London’.
The century following the Famine saw a steady decline in the instrument, so that by 1968, when just about all the known uilleann pipers in the world gathered in Bettystown, they numbered only around forty. Such has been the turnaround in its fortunes that there are now more than three thousand players of the instrument, concentrated in Ireland, Britain and anglophone countries, but also to be found in...
