Portamento and musical meaning

Authors

  • Daniel Leech-Wilkinson King’s College London
  • Fausto Borém Federal University of Minas Gerais

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-6377.2007.55126

Keywords:

singing, portamento, glissando, slide, vibrato, musical meaning, motherese

Abstract

Portamento was a significant expressive device among performers for at least two hundred years; yet, for the past sixty it has made musicians uncomfortable. More than a change of fashion, this suggests responses formed at a relatively deep psychological level. Drawing on work in developmental psychology, and reading in the light of it performances of art music lullabies, it is suggested that portamento draws on innate emotional responses to human sound, as well as on our earliest memories of secure, loving communication, in order to bring to performances a sense of comfort, sincerity, and deep emotion. The decline of portamento after the First World War and its sudden disappearance after the Second is traced to a new emphasis—influenced by psychoanalysis and reflected in writings on music—on darker meanings in music, which can be understood in the light of the reinterpretation of human motives and behavior forced on a wider public by the Second War. Portamento, because of its association (however unconscious) with naive trust and love, became embarrassingly inappropriate. This hypothesis also sheds light on the deepening of vibrato after the War, new objectivity and authenticity in Bach, the rise of music analysis, and the performances and writings of the avant-garde.

Author Biographies

  • Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, King’s College London

    Daniel Leech-Wilkinson studied composition, harpsichord, and organ at the Royal College of Music (London), a Master's in 15th-century music at King's College London, and a PhD in 14th-century compositional techniques at Clare College Cambridge, becoming a Professor Fellow at Churchill College. He taught at the universities of Nottingham and Southampton before returning to the Department of Music at King's College London in September 1997. As a researcher, he studies 14th-century French music, Renaissance performance practices, analysis of French Baroque music, and music after 1945. Recently, he has focused on techniques for studying musical performance styles. In addition to various articles and book chapters, he published the books Compositional Techniques in the Four-Part Isorhythmic Motets of Philippe de Vitry and his Contemporaries (Garland, 1989), Machaut’s Mass: An Introduction (Oxford University Press 1990, 1992), and Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre dou Voir Dit (co-authored with Barton Palmer; Garland, 1998), which is the first complete edition of Machaut's autobiographical romance. In his most recent book, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music (Cambridge, 2002), he presents a case study on ideology in historical musicology, showing how medieval music was re-imagined in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the journal Early Music, Associate Director and researcher at the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and regularly contributes to BBC Radio 3 and 4 in London, as well as writing a book on the study of performance through recordings.

  • Fausto Borém , Federal University of Minas Gerais

    Fausto Borém is a Professor at the School of Music at UFMG and a researcher at CNPq. He coordinates the research groups ECAPMUS (Studies in Motor Control and Learning in Musical Performance) and PPPMUS (“Pearls” and “Pickles” of Musical Performance), created and edits the journal Per Musi, and established the Master's program in Music at UFMG. He publishes work in the areas of performance, composition, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music education. As a double bassist, he has received several awards in Brazil and abroad.

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Published

2007-01-01

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No. 15 (2007): General Topics

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How to Cite

“Portamento and Musical Meaning”. 2007. Per Musi, no. 15 (January): 07-25. https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-6377.2007.55126.