Klarinet Archive - Posting 000033.txt from 2009/04

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Glissando vs. portamento (question for new music performers)
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:34:29 -0400

Sean Osborn wrote:
> Most of the problems that I can recall off-hand now are the film
> composers I usually work with. Half of them use gliss to mean a slide
> and half want notes, all the while both using "glissando" and a wavy
> line.

It wouldn't surprise me if that's not just because it's the default
setting in Finale or Sibelius (or both) and they don't have time to
worry about detailed customisation of the notation...

(The other frequent pain I've heard about is atonal pieces that are full
of B#'s and Fb's and so on because the composer leaves the transposition
on the default 'tonal' setting instead of switching it to chromatic.
Have you come across this one?:-)

> Sometimes I'll even have to play the same marking two different
> ways in the same film.

Ouch! :-(

> Often in new music for me, the problem comes
> when the word glissando is almost universally used, and half the time
> the composers want a slide, and half the time they don't.
>
> To be clearer, when I write, I use a line for portamento, meaning slide,
> and a wavy line for glissando, meaning notes.

That's a solution I've been inclined to use in my writing too -- as long
as it's explained in the part, it's very clear. Unfortunately, though,
it's not something we can rely on in anyone _else's_ pieces :-(

> A famous example that I'm not completely certain of is the Bernstein
> Sonata. He uses a wavy line and writes " poco gliss." in the second
> movement. I'm inclined to lean more towards playing notes there, but a
> slide is much more fun for me, so that's what I did on my recording.
> Stanley Drucker performed it many times with Bernstein, and on his
> recording, he does what I would call a "poco slide" or "poco
> portamento." It seems to me that Bernstein was using it in a manner
> that I would consider confusing.

Funny, it never really crossed my mind that this might cause a
notes/slide confusion because I would have expected that if discrete
notes were wanted, he'd have written them... (I don't think the wavy
line means anything. It's used for a smooth slide in plenty of works
from that period and before.)

I'd forgotten about the 'poco' (it's a while since I've looked at
Bernstein) but it kind of strengthens my impression that the slide
should be last-minute, quite close to portamento in the really
traditional sense. I've never heard Drucker's performance but from your
description it sounds like he's doing something along those lines...

Apparently (from recent reading up on this) such 'slide legatos' between
notes were an idiomatic performance practice on the classical flute in
the 18th and early 19th century: see e.g.
http://books.google.com/books?id=qtpwuiYw6QkC&pg=PA116&dq=glissando+flute

> I see from other research into the dictionaries' definitions, that there
> is debate among "experts" about this. I would submit that the Harvard
> Dictionary's definition, while perhaps not definitive, is certainly
> CLEARER. If composers used those terms, their intentions would be
> clearer to the interpreters.

I'd agree about the need for clarity. What I realised on reading the
violin text was that we (woodwind players) are probably being quite
parochial about our terminology concerns, and hence, the question of
what 'clarity' really means. We are pretty unique in being able to
produce both true slide and fast-scale glissandi, so for us that's the
major thing to distinguish -- but for a violinist (who can only slide),
the really important distinction is between 'sliding to produce a
definite slide' and 'sliding to create legato'.

Following the Harvard dictionary's definition might make things clearer
for us but would probably bugger up clarity for everyone else, either
leading to inconsistent terminology in different instrumental parts --
portamento meaning one thing to strings and another to us -- or forcing
other instrumental sections to invent new terminology of their own. At
least from a composer or conductor's point of view the current notation
is consistent across instrumental families, with a gliss always being a
deliberate slide of _some_ sort, smooth or discrete.

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