Michael Egan

[m4malious]

On the Boston MFA set....
There's more photos on Patrick Darcy's site.
I've got a roll of film prints of it from my visit in the mid 1990s.

Baines (IIRC) wrote up a whole article on this instrument, including the theory of the bass regulator
feed. I've got a hardcopy of that that I'll try and locate.

M

[Chris Bayley]

Baines gives it a brief mention in his book "Bagpipes" with regard to contra bass regulators but that is all.

The full description of the instrument with photographs, some sketchy measurements and a diagrammatic drawing of the "Differential Bass Regulator" are to be found in the catalogue of the collection "Ancient European Musical Instruments by Bessaraboff (1941). The section on the instrument in question was written with help from Patrick Brown and Daniel J Murphy.

I have retrieved my copy from the archives and will scan and post the entire description (including the notes from the appendices), photos and diagram of the "Differential Bass Regulator" once I have scanned and OCR'd them

[zarb]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R6T3zUZSK8
this might be of use, though it does not show muchmore than the photo.

[m4malious]

...meanwhile, here's a scan of said document:







M

[m4malious]

...interesting to note from the video that;

a) some work has been done since the article above (and certainly when I saw this instrument) in that a chanter bottom
ferrule and ivory ring are in place now. Certainly, those parts look "newish".

b) that the broken stump of what (I presume) was the baritone drone remains as just that.

M

[KM]

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=35557&view=next
Some interesting comments on it on an old post
I can't see how you could play with that ubend poking into the bag

[daveboling]

high tones are produced with the thumb-hole 'pinched' as on the recorder.

Maybe this where we have all been going wrong.
I'm not near an instrument to try this, but has anyone ever played in the second register by this method?
I never "pinched" any recorder to get the second octave, despite how I may have sounded...

dave boling

[Steve Bliven]

I got a note from Darcy Kuronen, curator of the Musical Instruments Collection of the MFA, regarding the Egan set. He's not a piper so needs to get an outside expert to come in, examine, measure the set, write something up, and all that. He has a standing invite for Benedict Koehler to do the honors (Benedict has done a program or two at the MFA in the past) but they haven't been able to work out the logistics as yet. Both parties have expressed interest but it just hasn't happened to date.

Best wishes.

Steve

[BarryONeill]

I heard the reamer story from Sean Reid, I believe. The stabbee was supposed to have been Martin Reilly of Galway who had made his way there to demand his pipes. There was another story about two people getting into a fight over an Egan chanter and one was killed.

A friend and I tried to find his grave. It seemed to be one of three in Calvary Cemetery in NYC, and went there but couldn't find anything to choose one plot over another. Perhaps with all the ancestry resources on the net someone could do the job.

[geoff wooff]

We read that Michael Egan died a Pauper, which does not surprise me in the least. Before the days of 'old age pensions' it was probably a very common thing and even today I can see it could easily happen to a Pipemaker.