The glissando as it is deployed in Western art music notation carries with it a number of challenges to the hegemony of traditional harmony, rhythm, and notation. The glissando embodies the smooth line, unlike the striated pitch-time space of traditional Western music, which aligns the glissando to many philosophical concepts, as well as mathematical, scientific, and architectural disciplines. Select works by Iannis Xenakis, James Tenney and Giacinto Scelsi are discussed for their development of glissandi as integral formal components, especially around the glissando’s tendency to encourage stasis. Compositional attempts to combine the nature of glissandi with drone in the author’s own work are described, providing an examination of examples of the way glissandi and related concepts can be notated formally, rather than decoratively, in musical works

Hope, Cat

Terren, Michael

English

Despite the prevalence of the term "line" in musicology to suggest a trajectory or contour of a melody, these do not embody the line in the Euclidean sense of the word, due to the striated, stepwise nature of pitches in the chromatic scale in traditional harmonic music. The glissando, however, embodies this literal and smooth line without fragmentation and has become a way to align music with other disciplines such as architecture, mathematics and physics. In a more figurative sense, the glissando has been used in a mimetic capacity to signify an irrational, metaphysical otherness. From modernist stochasticism to science fiction film scores, the glissando has a dynamic and complex relationship with representation.Glissandi explore ideas of sonic trace, surface-ness and stasis. The notation of glissandi, in traditional Western and graphical notation as well as spectrographic visualisation, is presented as a line, its horizontal axis being a measure of time, and its vertical axis being a measure of pitch. This "pitch-time space" enables the consideration of the line as a sonic trace—of motion, gesture or time itself. This also permits the conceptualisation of the line as a surface.Some glissandi also tend to operate in structural stasis, working against the glissando's function as a sonic trace, thus the glissando-as-stasis, especially as related to drone music, is explored. Deriving inspiration from works by composers, Iannis Xeankis, James Tenney and Giacinto Scelsi, compositional attempts to combine the nature of glissando with drone in the author's own work are de-scribed, providing an examination of examples of the way glissandi and related concepts can be notated formal-ly, rather than decoratively, in musical works

The possibilities of a line: Marking the glissando in music

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