Richard Pennycuick wrote: >When I first encountered the composer some years ago, his name was spelt >Miaskovsky, and I assumed that it was pronounced MEE-AH-SKOFF-SKEE. In >recent years, it's changed to Myaskovsky, which some have pronounced as >MY-AH-SKOFF-SKEE. I wondered whether the more recent spelling is an >attempt to combine M and YAH (as in the German Ja) into one syllable. Miaskovsky's name has THREE syllables, no matter how you transcribe or transliterate it. The first is "myah", pronounced together; it's not "mee-ah" and certainly not - what horror! - "my-ah". The transliteration and transcription of Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet are tricky, and no matter what system you use, some people will mispronounce words and names. -Margaret Mikulska