Portamento

The portamento (ital. Portamento di voce , also portar la voce "carrying the voice", not to be confused with the musical terms partimento or portato ) is a phrasing technique or an ornament in music. Today it is understood to mean that two consecutive notes in a melody are connected to one another by a slider or a short glissando . The portamento when singing serves as an aid to reaching high notes, but also to emphasize rhetorical figures such as the exclamatio .

Like a glissando, the portamento is notated with a compound line between two consecutive notes. Often the portamento technique (especially with strings or singers) is not explicitly written out in the notation and is used intuitively by the musicians.

Particularly sharply accentuated portamento-like gestures (mostly in French horns ) are also referred to as rip in English .

In addition, since Knud Jeppesen , portament has denoted a certain melodic figure in 16th century music.

The portamento as a technique in performance practice

The name has been around since the middle of the 18th century. After Johann Adam Hiller , it originally only mentions the good use of the voice among the Italians in “connecting notes” (1780). Johann Friedrich Agricola (1757) , however, speaks of a “drawing of the voice” . There is evidence of this singing technique much earlier, for example Domenico Mazzocchi (1638). At a time when the tines were the leading melody instruments, it stands to reason that the vocal parts also had a similar tone.

In the bel canto , the portamento is indispensable in certain places. It is indicated by a slur of the notes to be connected by dragging the voice up and down.

A "gliding tone movement" to fill in larger intervals has been in use in so-called late romantic music since the end of the 19th century and was adopted in some violin schools around 1900. The portamento is frequently used in Gustav Mahler's symphonies and orchestral songs, for example in his fourth symphony . After 1900, art music turned away from portamento or stylized it (like Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg ). Some genres such as film or popular music (see Schrammelmusik ) still maintain the extensive portamento. The Jazz has developed it with a different intonation.

The portament as a melodic figure in the 16th century

The term Portament was Knud Jeppesen also established for a typical phenomenon of vocal polyphony of the 16th century.

“By the portament note, we mean an unstressed quarter that anticipates the following stressed note. [...]

 

Portaments [!] […] May only be placed on an unstressed quarter and in front of an unstressed half note and (in Palestrina melodies) can only be used gradually downwards. In the case of early Italian composers from the beginning of the 16th century and, by the way, also of the contemporary Dutch [ie contemporary to Palestrina], one often observes the upward portament:

Unterterzportaments are also extremely common here, especially with Josquin des Prez , who can almost be recognized by the extensive use of this figure, e.g. B.:

These early composers also make regular use of the sub-fifth portament. "

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Knud Jeppesen, counterpoint. Textbook of Classical Vowel Polyphony , p. 118.
2. ↑ Knud Jeppesen, counterpoint. Textbook of classical vowel polyphony , pp. 74f.

literature

• Thomas Daniel: Two-part counterpoint . Cologne, Dohr 2002.
• Willibald Gurlitt, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Hrsg.): Riemann Musiklexikon . Material part . 12th edition. B. Schott's Sons, Mainz 1967, p. 741-742 .
• Knud Jeppesen: Counterpoint. Classical vocal polyphony textbook . Wiesbaden 1985.