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Hi Steve,

With portamento the slur is only a phrasing slur. What is involved is a specific type of piano touch, which as I am sure you know is described as halfway between staccato and legato, but it is a third touch and not an extended staccato or a detached legato. With the clavichord (and also here in reply to currawong) as I understand it, in the Italian clavichord literature portato involves increasing the tension on the string to raise the pitch, and portamento involves reducing the tension to lower the pitch. It seems that to describe all of this - including speculation on those Busoni "glissandos" - would be a very complicated procedure involving piano playing kinesiology and which would need a fair bit of time to work through in the details.

When it was said that there is no portamento on the piano as though that were the end of it I thought that it would make sense to join in the conversation and say that there is a specific touch with the piano to which stalefeas was referring.

This thread was the first time I encountered the use of "portato" for something that every where else I ever read which involved keyboard playing was described as "portamento" - but most of this material which I've read was written more than 60 years ago and the uses of words can change over time.


M.

You can certainly raise the pitch by increasing the pressure of the tangent on a string, but you can't lower it unless it has already been raised by that method. I guess you could taper off a firm initial stroke - I'm just surprised these terms are used. Must look it up.
So, interesting stuff, but probably not what Joel is asking. As he's arranging a Chopin song (which has a very simple chordal accompaniment with none of these things) for violin and piano, I can only assume he's talking about violin portamento, and how to notate it (if in fact you do at all). But as he seems to have gone missing, we don't really know. Ah well.

Yeah actually I have also assumed the portamento applies to the violin part. I have only seen a portamento in a piano work once, but I am not sure what was implied in that specific case. I understand portamento as being a slide from one note to another, usually written like a slur. Staccato marks with slurs I always hear being called portato. It is possible the terms have been interchanged throughout history, as they are very similar, but a true portamento would not be possible on piano, the closest approximation being a chromatic glissando.

The specific instance I have seen on piano was for a jazz étude, and in this case the slur connects a note and a rest. A colleague I consulted claimed that usually this means portamento when written for brass instruments, but that he has not seen this for piano before.