Glissando
musical ornament; to pass through all the notes or sounds between two notes
In music, a glissando (Italian: [ɡlisˈsando]; plural: glissandi, abbreviated gliss.) is a glide from one pitch to another (). It is an Italianized musical term derived from the French glisser, "to glide". In some contexts, it is equivalent to portamento, which is a continuous, seamless glide between notes. In other contexts, it refers to discrete, stepped glides across notes, such as on a piano. Some terms that are similar or equivalent in some contexts are slide, sweep bend, smear, rip (for a loud, violent glissando to the beginning of a note), lip (in jazz terminology, when executed by changing one's embouchure on a wind instrument), plop, or falling hail (a glissando on a harp using the back of the fingernails). On wind instruments, a scoop is a glissando ascending to the onset of a note achieved entirely with the embouchure, except on instruments that have a slide (such as a trombone).
Notation
The glissando is indicated by following the initial note with a line, sometimes wavy, in the desired direction, often accompanied by the abbreviation gliss.. Occasionally, the desired notes are notated in the standard method (i.e. semiquavers) accompanied by the word 'glissando'.
Discrete glissando
On some instruments (e.g., piano, harp, xylophone), discrete tones are clearly audible when sliding.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Glissando” is musical ornament; to pass through all the notes or sounds between two notes. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Glissando, musical and ornament, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “musical ornament; to pass through all the notes or sounds between two notes” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q471744. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Glissando” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.