INTRODUCTION to
O'Farrell's Pocket Companion
by Pat Sky and Patrick Hutchinson

(This is reproduced from Pat Sky's edition of O'Farrell's Pocket Companion courtesy of Pat Sky and Patrick Hutchinson)

            In the early 19th century, a collection of tunes in 4 volumes, called O'Farrell's  Pocket Companion for the Irish or Union Pipes, was published with suggested dates of 1805, 1806, 1808 and 1810, respectively (Cannon 1980: 82-85). Since the volumes themselves were not dated the actual publishing dates are not known. However a bit of detective work on Mr. Cannon's part, with regard to the publishers themselves, and when they were open for business, puts the dates into perspective.

Vol.1 of  The Pocket Companion seems to have been published just after the publication, in 1804, of his first book, O'Farrell's Collection Of National Irish Music for the Union Pipes, which, although it contained many tunes, was a primarily a detailed tutor for playing the Union  pipes.

The Pocket Companion (henceforth PC), unlike the National Collection (henceforth NC), is strictly a collection, containing 316 popular tunes of the day. Two hundred-odd years later we still instantly recognize many of the tunes, and realize that O'Farrell's publications are the source of much of our repertoire. Therein we find many old favorites such as: Pay the Reckoning, O'Carolan's Concerto, Paddy Whack, Paddy O Rafferty, the Kinnegad Slashers, the Langstrom Pony, Ride a Mile, the Rambles of Kitty, Apples in Winter, the Hag in the Blanket, Moll Rua, and the Butcher's March. Other tunes we recognize under different names: The Old Grey Goose is called We'el All Take Coach and trip it away (NC: 38), Strike the Gay Harp is called Jackson's Night Cap (NC: 34), Merrily Kissed the Quaker's Wife is called the Humours of Last Night (PC1:117), The Slopes of Sliabh Luachra is here as Morgan Rattler (PC1:109). Many of these tunes had, of course, been published before, but with O'Farrell's settings a piper feels instantly at home. Unlike some collections where the music is filtered through the completely alien aesthetic and musical education of the collector, it is always obvious that O'Farrell was a piper, and had "tried the tunes out for size," that is, for playability and range, on the pipes.

            We imagine that most pipers will use this book as a source for repertoire, and as with all tunes in musical notation, the reanimation of those tunes from the printed page is an act of interpretation, and a historically and socially located interpretation at that. By this we mean that the playing aesthetic and the toolkit of piping techniques we bring to playing off the printed page are particular to our time: O’Farrell and his contemporaries, it is worth remembering, quite obviously brought to the interpretation of the same printed tunes a radically different aesthetic and technique. Much of that technique is lost to us, but there are hints to its character to be found in his ornament notation, in the choice of tunes, and of course, in O'Farrell's pipe tutor included in the O'Farrell's Collection Of National Irish Music for the Union Pipes.

            Uilleann or Union piping must have sounded very different in O’Farrell’s day. Rolls as we know them are not mentioned, though something resembling a piping technique known as the cran is shown in the Tutor. O’Farrell’s playing instructions recommend playing the top hand notes with the tips of the fingers, and this position seems to have been standard until very recently (see, for example, many of the photos in O’Neill’s Minstrels and Musicians); The McPeakes of Belfast and piper Joe Shannon of Chicago, still use this method. The musical consequence of such a hand position is that the Ennis and Clancy “bent” C natural, so beloved of modern pipers, would not have been available as a musical choice, and indeed, few of the settings seem to dwell on this note.

            The dance tunes in the collection have, by and large, no ornament notation; most of the ornamentation is to be found in the slower song airs, O’Carolan pieces, and non-Irish pieces (gavots, minuets, etc.), and doesn’t seem to correspond to present-day practice. O'Farrell's ornamentation appears (as it was in the classical music of the day) to be about melodic embellishment, as opposed to the propulsive way piping movements are used to accentuate rhythm today.

            The most common ornament, to O'Farrell, is what a modern audience of pipers would read as a single cut or grace  note written as a separate little eighth note, or sometimes the same with an additional slash through the stem as in the Castletown Hunt, (PC1:6) and the Fall of Paris, (PC1:22). We don’t know how this was interpreted: did it take time from the next note as it does in classical music practice or is it like today’s accenting cut? O’Farrell says the former (NC10: appoggiaturas), but his usage of the grace note symbol is not always consistent. In O’Carolan’s Concerto (PC1:16), for example, do we interpret the grace note D in the 12th measure as an appoggiatura, or as an example of the first notation of the “back-D cut” so common in modern piping?

            Most of the single grace note usage appears simply either to fill in the interval of a third, creating a “triplet” effect, both in 4/4 tunes (Humours of Castlecomber, (PC1:26) and in 6/8 Stad Erro Stad etc, (PC1:31) ). The commonest usage of the single grace note in the “non-dance” tunes appears to be as a cadential figure or finishing flourish on the last beat of the penultimate measure, often combined with a trill (noted  tr ).

The double grace note usage appears to be melodic fill-ins ( Erin go braugh, (PC1:39), though there are a few instances which make no sense to my fingers ( (PC1:35), A to F via a BD double grace note); the occasional larger grace note groupings also appear foreign to modern piping technique ( (PC1:58), E FGFA G, all grace notes).

            O’Farrell the piper is evident in a number of settings: the occasional tune that drops to the C below the bottom  D always  has  the C noted  an  octave above as well (Cusabue Ord, PC1:52; the Good Fellow, PC1:60), and tunes in A for the most part avoid the G#.

                That O'Farrell was aware of the capability for playing staccato on the Uilleann pipes chanter is certain, though the only application of this capability mentioned in his tutor is a demonstration of tipping (NC:11-13). Looking at the tunes in the PC , which have staccato playing indicated by apostrophes (as per classical music). We can surmise that staccato playing at the time was not a thoroughly integrated stylistic feature as it is today, but rather a device used primarily for programmatic or descriptive purposes (the Hen's Concert, (PC1:42) ; the Nightingale, (PC3:58) ; Marinda, (PC4:140) ; the Irish Fox Hunt (PC2:145-47) ).

Although in the NC O'Farrell discusses the single regulator, the only notation for the regulator in the 4 tune books appears to be in the tune Bright Phoebus (3:26). The notation Sy (symphony?) indicating where the notes are to be played in unison or octaves using chanter  and regulator, and So (solo?) by chanter alone.

            And what a piper he must have been! If O’Farrell could indeed play all the tunes he included in the collection then his technique, and his instrument, must have been phenomenal: the third octave D is commonplace, jumping between the back D and the top A and B abounds Handle’s Minuet, (PC2:87), as does jumping between the octaves at will Ailen Aroon, (PC1:20-21). Not easy on a concert-pitch chanter, but certainly possible on a flat set. Then there are a several tunes in g minor: Drimen down oge, (PC2:127), Rakes of Cashell, (PC2:110) ; and in d minor: Miller’s Maggot, (NC31), Curra Koun Dilish, (PC1:34), Port Gordon, (PC1:50-51), the Good Fellow, (PC1:60). What are we to assume, given that O’Farrell’s tutor makes no mention of a keyed chanter?

Repertoire and Tune Types

            The collection comprises quite a variety of tune types with jigs predominating, and scarcely a reel in sight. It is Lord Kelly’s Reel (PC1:14) that marks the earliest appearance of the word “reel” in Irish tune collections.

            Two musical forms that we find in the book but which are no longer to be heard in Irish traditional music are the Tune (both song tunes and dance tunes) with Variations (Aileen Aroon, (PC1:20) among many others), and the twelve Duets in Volume 2. The variational praxis at work in the “Tune with Variations” is not at all like the way today's players produce variations while playing. Rather it usually consists of the basic 2-part tune, which is then melodically and rhythmically elaborated. This may (combined perhaps with a knowledge of slow air playing based on sean-nós singing) have been the source for the piece way of jig playing that survived in Garret Barry's and thence in Willie Clancy's playing. The other form, the Duet (How Sweet in the Woodlands, PC2:165), probably reflects O'Farrell's experience gained from performing pipe/harp duets with harpers Weippart and Nicholson, and has no modern equivalent in Irish music tradition (except for the O'Riada-influenced modern tradition--one thinks of Paddy Moloney and Seán Potts' polyphonic whistle duets, or the Bothy Band's  arrangement of  The Maids of Mitchellstown).

            If this collection is, in fact, a snapshot of the repertoire of a typical Uilleann piper at the turn of the 18th century, then what does this tell us about the musical cohort to which he belonged, and about the audiences for which he played? We can only speculate, and we do that best by examining O'Farrell himself as best as we can.

            His taste in tunes is certainly small-c catholic, and there’s no nationalist exclusionary policy at work: tunes from Scotland especially, abound, though there are also tunes from England and Wales, from classical composers of the period Handle's Minuet, (PC2:87), and from popular songsmiths such as Thomas Moore's  Fly Not Yet, (PC3:21) and Robert Burns. Perhaps this breadth of repertoire is the best indication of his audience: just as you can find a recording today of jazz sax player Ben Webster playing Danny Boy, so too was O’Farrell likely required to be able to satisfy requests for the popular songs of the day, regardless of their provenance.

O’Farrell the Man

            O'Farrell the man makes the occasional appearance between the lines: we can tell he was no Irish speaker from the abysmal transliterations of Irish titles. We know he was a composer of tunes because he includes some of his own compositions:  O’Farrell’s welcome to Limerick (NC:39) ; O’Farrell’s hornpipe (NC:39) ; Ryan’s hornpipe (PC3:67) ; Miss Walker's Favorite (PC4:103) ; The Waterford Waltz (PC4:138) ; Wellington's Coming (PC4:87) ; Farrell's Favorite Minuet (PC1:64) . He includes 3 tunes from Oscar and Malvina, the stage production in which he played. For more of  what we know of O'Farrell we quote from Patrick Sky's own introduction to his 1997 reissue of O'Farrell's Collection Of National Irish Music for the Union Pipes:

           "There are three pieces of direct evidence that tell us of O'Farrell the man. First, in the frontispiece of this book under O'Farrell's picture, the caption states that he was a performer in the pantomime production of Oscar and Malvina. Secondly, at the bottom of this  page, we are told that he resided at 65 Swallow Street, where copies of his book and pipes could be purchased. The last bit of evidence is contained in A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, etc:

"About 1795 was published a sonata by Thomas Costellow, to which was added an air in a ballet, the True Lovers Knot, as  it had  been  performed by Mr. "O'Farrol" and Weippert.  On 20  June 1803 at the royal Circus the same pair (with the former's name spelled O'Farrell) accompanied the ballet The Black Knight on the union pipes and harp. O'Farrell was a bagpiper (Highfill 1973: 95)."

Séamus Ó Casaide tells us that O'Farrell was born in Clonmel although his search of the census records failed to turn up any evidence to confirm this fact. He also states that there are some playbills that mention "Mr. O'Farrell," but I was not able to find them. He tells us that Grattan Flood claimed that O'Farrell's name was Patrick (Irish Book Lover 1961: 19).  There is one small bit of weak evidence to support this: Mr. Nick Chadwick of  The British Library informed me that their copy of O'Farrell's Collection Of National Irish Music for the Union Pipes bears a manuscript inscription of  "P. O'Farrell."

            O'Farrell says that he performed in Oscar and Malvina. The date usually given is 1791. I searched through many volumes of The London Stage, which lists all of the productions of Oscarand Malvina, a pantomime written by William Reeve and performed at Covent Garden, and I could not find any mention of O'Farrell. Knowing that O'Farrell performed with a harper named Weippert, I uncovered the fact that John Erhardt Weippert (erroneously listed in The London Stage as John Michael Weippert) was a very famous harper (Highfill 1973: 335) who performed at Covent Garden in almost all of the performances of Oscar and Malvina between 1791 and 1794, but with a piper named Dennis Courtney (erroneously listed in O'Neill's as Patrick Courtney) on the Union pipes. Courtney was "an itinerant Irish musician of great fame in the British provences" (Highfill  1973:8 ).

            Between the years of 1791 and 1794, the year of Courtney's death, there is no mention of an-other piper. However  on March 12, 1795 Weippert again per-formed Oscar and  Malvina with "The UNION PIPES by an Emi-nent Performer (his 3rd app-earance in public)" (Harvard). Could this be O'Farrell? I would say that it is very possible since O'Farrell did, later on, continue to perform with Weippert. I should also mention that Weippert performed on May 5 and again on March 2, 1798 with another Union piper named Murphy."

Since the re-publication of O'Farrell's Collection Of National Irish Music for the Union Pipes, piper and teacher Bill Ochs, sent copies of  the playbill on the right, which he found in the Lincoln Center Library of Performing Arts in New York city, and which shows that O'Farrell did perform in Oscar and Malvina at a later date--1809.  Although this does not prove that he performed  at an earlier date it definitely lends credence to his claim of having performed before the publication of his O'Farrell's Collection Of National Irish Music for the Union Pipes in 1804.      

The republication of O'Farrell's Pocket Companion involved many hours of painstaking digital restoration by Patrick Sky. With this reissue we hope to open a window on past practice and repertoire, and to illuminate O'Farrell, an important and neglected figure in the history of Uilleann piping and Irish music. We know full well that this short introduction asks more questions than it answers, with this in  mind we  hope to encourage others toward further research into the beginnings of our instrument.