portamento means A smooth, gliding transition from one note to another; used especially with stringed instruments, and sometimes on brass. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 87 out of 100.
portamento is pronounced /pɔːtəˈmɛntəʊ/.
Why “portamento” is a great word
A smooth, gliding transition in pitch from one note to another, especially in singing or string and brass playing. From Italian portamento ("a bearing, carrying"), from portare ("to bear, carry"), from Latin portāre ("to carry"), the term was first attested in English musical discourse around 1771. Unlike a "glissando," which audibly slides through the intervening steps of a scale, or "legato," which connects distinct notes without a slide, portamento is the seamless carriage of sound between two specific tones. It is the human voice, in a moment of raw ache, drifting through the microtonal space between sorrow and resolution; the cellist's finger weighing the string with a slow, grieving pressure; the trombone's embouchure yielding a sigh that belongs to neither note but to the vulnerable air between them. In this deliberate defiance of the discrete scale, the journey itself becomes the destination—a fleeting music born from the act of bearing sound from one certainty to the next.
Etymology
From Italian portamento, from portare (“bear, carry”).
noun
- A smooth, gliding transition from one note to another; used especially with stringed instruments, and sometimes on brass.“The music was feral, Eastern in scale, flattened seconds and sixths, and a kind of fretless portamento between”