rorybbellows wrote:
So if you were to name one person who you think was instrumental in the (post Leo Rowsome) modern revival in Uilleann piping who would you think that is ?
I tend to agree with alot of the experts who have been around long enough to know ,and say that without Micheal Flatley alot of people would not got into piping.The membership of NPU shot up in the years after Riverdance as this was their first exposure to Irish culture and then one thing lead to another.
I don't know anything about the situation in Ireland, but the situation here in the US is pretty much as Rory implies.
I started in the mid-1970's and was inspired by Paddy Moloney, Liam O Flynn, Paddy Keenan, and Finbar Furey. I had albums of all of these before 1980.
Though these inspired me, they didn't seem to inspire many others.
I spent decades as the only uilleann piper in the area. I would get calls from people expressing interest in the pipes a couple times a month.
Then two things hit the American public's awareness at about the same time:
Riverdance and Braveheart.
Suddenly, instead of two calls a month, I was getting a half-dozen calls a week. Sometimes several a day. It seemed like thousands of Americans had suddenly "discovered" the uilleann pipes and were hot to get a set.
These people, used to the factories-to-wholesale-to-retail nature of the normal music industry, could not comprehend that there was no place on the planet that they could walk in and buy a set.
I tried to explain that there were only about a dozen makers (which was, as far as I could tell, the case at that time) and that a maker could take a month to make a full set. 12 x 12 = 144 sets, the entire world production of uilleann pipes per year. I might get that many calls from people looking for pipes in a month!
So I would say the biggest impact was by Eric Rigler (and of course the composer who hired him, and the director and producer who hired the composer) and next the piper in Riverdance (and the guy who composed the music and hired the piper).
Funny, the summer before Braveheart there were two or three movies that used uilleann pipes in the soundtrack, Rob Roy, The Field, and perhaps a third. Maybe these prepared the American audience for the pipes in Braveheart, who can say?
But it was the dual and cross-fertilising impact of Braveheart and Riverdance that put the pipes on the map for most Americans.
