Irish Woodwind Trade
There is no doubt that for most of the English speaking world, that London was the heart and centre of woodwind, and particularly flute making, from the mid 18th through the early 20th centuries.
Regional cities did have resident makers, but the whole issue is clouded by the fact that the retail music industry was a complex association of music publishers, teachers, makers, and resellers.
This is evidenced by many of the advertisements from contemporary newspapers, where many in the trade offered a breath taking range of services.
How this affects research into this area is largely in that music shops, let’s call them, would commission instruments from large manufacturers and stamp them with their own mark and address, thus clouding the issue of where there were made and who actually made them.
At this point I should perhaps explain why I’m referring to the woodwind trade, and not the flute trade on its own, and the simple answer to this is that almost all the makers, even those that we strongly associate with flutes, made other woodwinds, clarinets, oboes, and even brasswind instruments.
The situation in Ireland was essentially no different, if complicated, as usual in Ireland by politics, but also by the presence here of a native woodwind trade in the form of the makers of uilleann pipes.
The fact that this instrument dates only from the end of the 18th century, and that it’s strongly suspected, that some pipe makers made flutes, begs the question: were the first uilleann pipes made by an existing corpus of woodwind makers, keen to supply a new market, or did this trade arise independently?
This and other questions I’m currently trying to answer, a quest made considerably more difficult by the destruction of almost the entire national archives in the Four Courts during the Civil War (politics again!).
But progress is being made…
Check out my these posts (1 and 2) on my Flutemaker blog.
And also a really informative database of relevant information found on the DUBLIN MUSIC TRADE website.