Klarinet Archive - Posting 000045.txt from 2004/06

From: ormondtoby@-----.net (Ormondtoby Montoya)
Subj: RE: [kl] glissando help
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2004 22:33:48 -0400

Karl wrote:

> I've read more than once that this (just a
> scale) is the way Gershwin intended it - that
> the first actual glissando treatment of the
> Rhapsody opening originated half
> tongue-in-cheek (not literally) as the principal
> clarinetist in the Whiteman orchestra (I forget
> his name at the moment) was fooling with it at
> a rehearsal for the premier. After all, the
> pianist can't do it that way... :-)

This has nothing to do with the original 'how-to-do-it' question, but
this time around, nobody has mentioned portabello vs glissando. At
least one musical dictionary (New Harvard Dictionary) says that a piano
*can* do a glissando. The first two sentences in Harvard's entry are:

"A continuous or sliding movement movement from one pitch to another.
On the piano, the nail of the thumb or of the third finger or the side
of the index finger is drawn, usually rapidly..." [etc]

In the next paragraph, some six or seven sentences later, the Harvard
dictionary discusses stringed instruments and woodwinds and finally
introduces the (not universally accepted) distinction that some
instruments "may produce a continuous variation in pitch rather than a
rapid succession of discrete pitches [...] and is sometimes termed
portabello"

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