Just found what I was looking for to answer the 3/2 hornpipe thread.. The same words are/were used for different musical forms at different times in different places. Here's an extract from my Intro to The Master Piper (Wm Dixon's tunes), it's quite long so delete now if this doesn't interest you:
The 3/2 measure is largely unfamiliar today, though there has been a revival in interest in the last decade or so. My own first brush with it was John Offord’s collection John of the Greeny Cheshire Way - The Famous “Double” Hornpipes of Lancashire and Cheshire. The expression “a particular species of the ‘double hornpipe’ ” was used by Stenhouse to describe tunes like Go To Berwick Johnny. It has caught on, but it contradicts usage elsewhere. It may never be possible to get right to the bottom of the nomenclature of the various types of hornpipe, but it does not ultimately matter. The important thing to realise is that there was a dance called a hornpipe which was danced to music in 4/4, 9/4 and 3/2 at the same period in history. Whether it was one dance or, more probably, three related dances or three completely different dances is another question, but it is time to refute the oft-repeated assertion that 4/4 (or 2/2) hornpipes displaced or replaced 3/2 hornpipes. They certainly survived longer, but that is another thing entirely. The displacement theory is contradicted by the appearance in Playford’s Division Violin as early as 1684 of A new Horn-pipe in cut time, a tune easily identifiable as Dumbarton’s Drums, often described later as a “Scotch Measure”. The exact meaning of the latter term is yet another question: tunes labelled thus are rhythmically indistinguishable from early 4/4 hornpipes, but melodically they make much use of gapped-scale passages. The clearest distinction between the three types of hornpipe is found in a Scottish collection by Charles Stewart published as late as 1799. Stewart is significantly known to have worked as a “Musician to Mr. Strange”, a dancing master, and he distinguishes between “Treeble” hornpipes in 4/4, “Double” hornpipes in 9/8, and “Single” hornpipes in 3/2, though he makes a common mistake in giving the latter a 6/4 time signature. The distinctions seem more likely to be related to dance steps than to the mathematical qualities of the time signatures, which they flatly contradict. Stewart’s distinctions would be unequivocal were it not for his second collection which has two 3/2 tunes, one of which he calls a single and one a double hornpipe. An English origin is usually ascribed to the 3/2 hornpipes, and they were certainly popular in England early in the 18th century and before, but it is not now generally realised how popular they were in Scotland, and also how much later they seem to have been current there: fiddlers were certainly writing and publishing 3/2 hornpipe tunes very late into the century and even into the next. A few of the more popular tunes also turn up in Irish pipe collections of the 19th century, where they are usually described as Irish. All this proves that they once enjoyed a wide currency and had been long enough established to be thought of as native all over the British Isles. But Jimmy Allan thought that “this peculiar measure originated in the borders of England and Scotland”, and Stenhouse said that the tunes had been played “time out of mind” in Scotland; there are Northumbrian and Scottish songs to many of the tunes, and it is a fact that the form has survived longer in Northumberland than anywhere else: singers and pipers did not need a revival to teach them Dance Ti’ Thy Daddy and Lads Of Alnwick. Although none of this proves a Border origin for the form it should certainly lead Border pipers to take it very seriously. Although the oldest known 3/2 hornpipe tunes are for keyboard or fiddle the term “Bagpipe Hornpipe” is employed by Daniel Wright for some tunes in 3/2 and 9/4. These do not fit the compass of a limited-range chanter: perhaps they are fiddle adaptations, or perhaps they belonged to the pastoral pipe repertoire. But whether for bagpipes or not, most of the 3/2 and 9/4 tunes employ the same kind of two-chord structure that is common in pipe tunes, and it seems likely that it is this structural feature which is signified by the term ‘bagpipe hornpipe’. As a musical genre - a tune type - they have the effect of a ‘reel and a half’, and are quite wonderful to play. In the light of William Dixon’s collection, it is now possible to come up with a list of surviving bagpipe hornpipes which can actually be played on the Border pipes. (end of extract) Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
