Portato is also known as articulated legato (Blood 2012).
Description[]
One type of portato notation, also used for staccato and flying spiccato.
Portato is a bowing technique for stringed instruments (Anon. 2001), in which successive notes are gently re-articulated while being joined under a single continuing bow stroke. It achieves a kind of pulsation or undulation, rather than separating the notes. It has been notated in various ways. One early 19th-century writer, Pierre Baillot (L’art du violon, Paris, 1834), gives two alternatives: a wavy line, and dots under a slur. Later in the century a third method became common: placing "legato" dashes (tenuto) under a slur (Wall 2001a). The notation with dots under slurs is ambiguous, because it is also used for very different bowings, including staccato and flying spiccato (Walls 2001a; Walls 2001b).
Currently, portato is sometimes indicated in words, by "mezzo-staccato" or "non-legato"; or can be shown by three graphic forms:
a slur that encompasses a phrase of staccato notes (the most common), or
a tenuto above a staccato mark (very often), or
a slur that encompasses a phrase of tenuto notes (less common) (Tsai 2008).
Anon. n.d. "Notes portées" (redirect). Grove Music Online, ed by Deane Root. Oxford Music Online (accessed 5 June 2016).(subscription required)[verification needed]
Anon. 2001. "Portato". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second ion, ed by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Kennedy, Michael. 1994. "Portato". The Oxford Dictionary of Music, second ion, revised. Associate or, Joyce Bourn. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-869162-9.
Tsai, Chia-Fen. 2008. "Articulation". The "Thirty Caprices" of Sigfrid Karg-Elert: A Comprehensive Study. AAT 3325459.[full citation needed]ISBN9780549808930.
Walls, Peter. 2001a. "Bow, §II, 3. Bowstrokes after c1780, (iii) Portato". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second ion, ed by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Walls, Peter. 2001b. "Bow, §II, 3. Bowstrokes after c1780, (vi) Staccato". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second ion, ed by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.