Portamento and Musical Meaning

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. [Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to http://www.arts.unco.edu/jmr/ for the following free supplemental resources: eight Sound Clips featuring archival early-twentieth-century recordings of works by Bach, Brahms, Donizetti, and Schubert.]