Talk:Portamento

portmanteau

This should be disambiguated from close homophone "portmanteau". Wikidity (talk) 03:07, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

move pitchbending to glissando?

There has been talk of merging with glissando, an article in much need of reorganization. Will anyone mind moving the pitchbend secftion over there, keeping the two narrower definitions on this page? Sparafucil 06:03, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

ornament?

I flagged the ornamentation section, not finding reference to portamento in the Harvard Dictionary or Schoenberg's Counterpoint. If it is a real term, it would be useful to define it closely and perhaps add an example. Sparafucil 05:05, 10 June 2007 (UTC) Great! I see Gaudlin at the bottom of the page and have removed the tag. A definition or better an example would still be nice. Sparafucil 06:03, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

I have failed to locate the 16c book, but Gauldin's 18c counterpoint text has only passing references to "anticipation or portamento" I've removed the following explanation:

Ornamentation

In 16th century style, portamento is an anticipation figure, occurring on the off-beat. The portamento resolves stepwise, almost always downward. It may occur either once or multiple times in succession.

In multi-voice polyphony, the portamento figure is normally consonant. This embellishment is frequently found ornamenting suspensions, though almost never at the final cadence.

Sparafucil (talk) 01:52, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Heifitz

I removed the Jascha Heifitz reference from the Pitch Bending section here. It was placed in a manner such that it obfuscated the clarinet-to-Rhapsody In Blue segué, and grammatically screamed "English as a second language." I didn't see that it would actually add anything to the article, else I would have merely moved it to a place where it would be appropriate.

I think it was just a Heifitz fan, trying to say "Classical violinists use Portamento too, not just jazz, see?", but the fact that the term is in Italian in the first place pretty much implies that it's used in Classical music.

Infinity Squared 05:31, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

vocal or instrumental

I thought that portamento referred to the vocal technique, while glissando is the instrumental one. LorenzoB 07:49, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

This article disagrees with the Glissando article; the glissando page refers to "true glissando" which is identical to the definition of portamento presented here, as well as "simulated glissando" which is what the portamento article calls simply "glissando".

Also, trombonists do not call portamento "slurring", they call it "glissing"; the trombone is not capable of a true slur, and must simulate slurs by lightly tonguing while changing notes, as opposed to a gliss where no tonguing takes place. GM 15:25, 7 Feb 2007 (UTC)

Slur?

Is this the same thing as the slur known to stringed instruments? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.14.94.170 (talk) 07:45, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

No, not quite. Players of bowed stringss refer to a legato articulation taken without a change in bow direction as a slur. There is not neccesarily a slide in pitch involved. Sparafucil 01:00, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Notation

How would you indicate portamento in a score? Is there a stardard way or would one just write "portamento" above a slur or zigzag gliss line? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Veggieburgerfish (talk • contribs) 23:47, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Merge into Glissando

I don't think these two concepts are distinct enough to merit separate articles. Also, as far as I can tell, portamento appears to be a subset of glissando. Publicly Visible (talk) 20:41, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Actually, Portamento appears to merit its own article after all. See Talk:Glissando#References, condensed definitions and examples, and a proposal to merge. Publicly Visible (talk) 21:07, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

NPOV?

I'm not sure the sentence (actually, the whole section) 'However, when there is no such specification, the singer is expected to be able to move crisply from note to note without any slurring or "scooping".' is not violating Wikipedia's NPOV policy. Although many musicians share that opinion, there are lots who are less restrictive with portamenti. I either suggest an expansion of the section with other points of view (a detailed stylistic discussion might be found, for instance, in: Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance, www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html) or simply removing it. AdamSiska (talk) 03:28, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

The sentence in question cites Potter 2006, though the page reference is missing. Assuming that it correctly represents what Potter says, do you believe that WP:NPOV requires that a contrary opinion be offered? On the other hand, if you have a source with such a contrary view (Leech-Wilkinson, for example), what is stopping you from adding it to the article?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 04:50, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

I wasn't aware that that sentence is actually a quotation. As it is embedded in the text without any quotation mark or an 'according to Potter' or something similar (although there is a reference which in a way makes it clear that it is a quotation) my first though was that the editor of the article is telling his own opinion about portamenti. The Leech-Wilkinson book is not actually a completely contrary view, but it talks a lot about how and why the use (and the critics' opinions) of portamenti changed during the last hundred years, and considering that, the quoted sentence seems to be quite much an oversimplification of this particular problem. However, since 'extracting' even the most relevant information from, let's say, Leech-Wilkinson would take a long time, I might postpone this task to a later time in my life. I just wanted to let editors know that some less strong statement might be more adequate here. AdamSiska (talk) 23:43, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

The sentence is not actually a quotation but, as you correctly observe, it does bear a reference. The usual practice in such cases is that the reference is supposed to support the claim made in the sentence to which it is attached (thus obviating the need to say "according to Potter", or the like). If the editor of the article (whoever he or she may be) is interpolating his/her own view, or is incorrectly inferring such a view from the source, then indeed Wikipedia guidelines are not being followed, and the sentence should be rewritten to accurately reflect the source. This is being made difficult here by the lack of page number in the inline reference, which requires carefully reading through 28 pages to determine the accuracy of the allegation. If in fact Potter turns out to make exactly this claim, and makes it emphatically, it would only be appropriate to suggest it is an oversimplification if another source can be cited showing that this is so.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 02:55, 24 January 2011 (UTC)