How do y'all pronounce the above two words?

This yall pronounces it (ba-ROAK PEE-an-ess).
And I'm right.

Gosh if you say it out loud it sounds like a urologic emergency...

I'd say something like ba-ROCK pee-AN-nist, though I have said 'ba-ROAK' before. I don't see why one wouldn't pronounce the 't' in 'pianist' to tell the truth.

(auf Deutsch würde ich eher 'PEE-an-nist' sagen übrigens, oder aber einfach 'Klavierspieler' ;-)

Yep, by - I also have heard (and used) both pronunciations, but in Britland I usually hear ba-ROCK, espec. amongst the students and lecturers from the Music Department.

/ba ROAK PEE a nist/ OR /ba ROAK pee AH nist/

(but I agree completely with by on the 't' )

buh-ROAK PEA-uh-nist


This thread is funny in an offbeat, even off-color, way...

OK, anachronisms aside, I'm interested in the two words independently. I pronounce them as WW does, but I am hearing more and more edjumicated USns saying Ba-ROCK (and even BAH-rock), as the Brits do, and pi-A-nist. Just observing change here, you understand.

I suspect that there were no pianos when Baroque was the prevalent art form
And I always heard it pronounced "ba rock". Maybe because I was reading in German.

I'll weigh-in with WordWind on pronunciation. Can't say I've ever heard (or maybe just never noticed) ba-ROCK.

From music history classes long ago, we learned that the Baroque Period ran parallel with Bach's dates: 1685-1750. The piano was invented during those years somewhere about 1719 by someone named something like Christofori, but I really have forgotten the details.

The piano wasn't widely accepted at first. However, if I were to hear the term "Baroque Piano," I really would think off the top of my hat that someone had made a recording of something written for harpsichord, but had translated the work to piano. Carson McCullers was immovable in her belief that baroque harpsichord works sounded best on piano. So I'd describe her as a person who loved baroque piano, even though the term seems confusing at first sight.

Here is part of encyclopedia article. Notice German scholars apparently first used the term.
And I seem to remember it being spelled "Barock".
"The origins of the word baroque are not clear. It may have been derived from the Portuguese barocco or the Spanish barueco to indicate an irregularly shaped pearl. The word itself does not accurately define or even approximate the meaning of the style to which it refers. However, by the end of the 18th century baroque had entered the terminology of art criticism as an epithet leveled against 17th-century art, which many later critics regularly dismissed as too bizarre or strange to merit serious study. Writers such as the 19th-century Swiss cultural historian Jakob Burckhardt considered this style the decadent end of the Renaissance; his student Heinrich Wölfflin, in Principles of Art History (1915; translated 1932), first pointed out the fundamental differences between the art of the 16th and 17th centuries, stating that "baroque is neither a rise nor a decline from classic, but a totally different art."



"Baroque Art and Architecture," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia. (c) 1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

.. Becker it was the international dictionary ... that the usual criteria of definition ...
Entries are arranged alphabetically by German ... [ak/gw]. Baumeister des Barock und ...
http://www.rre.casalini.com/2000/be.html

Bach penis?

Nah. Ziegenbock.

Shwartzenneger is doing a movie about baroque musicians. During a casting session he told one of his fellow actors, "You be Vivaldi, and I'll be Bach."

Gosh if you say it out loud it sounds like a urologic emergency... ~A.W

Bach penis? ~WO'N

What is it with you guys!?

can't say I've ever heard (or maybe just never noticed) ba-ROCK

Ni moi aussi. Unless - maybe - an Israeli politician?

put my vote in with WW and nancy...

four years of Conservatory and I never heard ba-rock...

and why wouldn't you pronounce the "t"?

put my vote in with WW and nancy...

Call me chopped liver....

Well, one of the USn guys I consistently hear using the "Rock" pronunciation is none other than the venerable Bill McGlaughlin, host of NPR's "St. Paul Sunday."


http://www.stpaulsunday.org/

Maybe because it's true: Bach rocks!

That explains it. Can't say I've ever heard the venerable Bill McGlaughlin either

broke penis? (actually®, I think that's closer)

So in 'Bama, milum, a Baroque pianist is a broke penis?

Dear WO'N : Please read this article, and let AS relax:
FRACTURE OF THE PENIS: A CRITIQUE OF CLINICAL

FEATURES AND MANAGEMENT


http://www.kfshrc.edu.sa/annals/175/96-268.html

Dear Dr. Bill: You mean a Baroque pianist couldn't play if he fractured his...oh never mind.

They mostly played organs, but not fractured ones.

Yeah, I guess Bach would've had to play with his organ a lot in order to get as good as he was.

What Bill, no pictures?

Dear Fiberbabe: If I could have found pictures, I would have given URL.
Love's Labour Loused Up. Unsafe shifts and shunts.

...and the Well-Tempered Fugue.

the Well-Tempered Fugue
I most certainly do not!

BTW, Dr. Bill, thanks for the fracture site...I made a hard copy of it!

Fugue? That's The Well-Tempered Clavier. We are talking about the Baroque canon, right?

Well, Whitman.. not to introduce more off-color stuff to this thread, but Bach did sire 20 children, so he had to be prolific in more ways than one. (I'm not even going to go with the "playing with his organ" thing, either..)

"Did you eat another dictionary?" -- what an online friend said to me once

Didn't Bach sire more than 20 children? I should go google that.

Google should be in the dictionary.


Edit: 20 children is correct; I was incorrect. I thought it had been 22 or 23, but I stand corrected. Just read only ten of them survived to adulthood. Hard times back then. Also read that his first wife had seven, and the poor second had thirteen.

22, I think.

and PDQ was the 23rd...

Hi, et'...

I thought it was about 22, too, but I googled a couple of sites that both stated he had 20. That wasn't counting PDQ, however, so I guess the correct count would be 21, PDQ included.

My recollection, clearly flawed once again, was that he had nine children by his first wife, and then sixteen more by his second, making a total of twenty-five.

Somewhere on Peter Shickele's liner notes he identifies which number child was PDQ - does anyone have access to it still?

Edit: The PQD Bach page http://www.presser.com/composers/pdqbach.html sidesteps the issue (no pun intended, of course) definitively :

The conspiracy of silence that has surrounded P.D.Q. Bach (1807-1742)? for two centuries began with his own parents. He was the last and the least of the great Johann Sebastian Bach's twenty-odd children, and he was certainly the oddest...

Well, one thing's fersure. Whatever Bach had, he didn't have a baroque pianist.

Buh-ROCK PEE-uh-nis(t). I suspect I only pronounce the t before a vowel.

Bingley

Oh dear, y'all are sadly lacking in info on old J.S.

The Baroque period of music began well before J.S. Bach, at least one generation before his birth in 1685. It was already coming to an end in his lifetime. By the latter part of his life, he was already somewhat out of date and when he died in 1750, the Baroque era died with him, as he was by then the only major practitioner of the Baroque polyphonic style. (So did his music until resurrected 70-odd years later mostly through the efforts of Felix Mendelssohn.) Sadly, his musician sons had little respect for the old boy's style, preferring the new Italian style then coming into vogue, which was the forerunner of the Classical style of Mozart, Haydn, etc. They used to refer to him behind his back as "the old wig", referring to the old-fashioned full bottomed wigs which the old boy wore (they wore the newer smaller style which were worn in the latter part of the 18th century).

20 children it was, 7 by his first wife, Barbara. Poor woman seems to have worn out early and suddenly. He was away on a trip with his employer and came back to learn she was dead and had been buried the preceding week. Two of his sons by this wife, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philip Emmanuel were well known musicians and composers in their time. He remarried in less than 2 years, since in those days a professional man with 7 children needed a wife. His second, Anna Magdalena, was made of tougher material and bore him 13 children. One of his youngest sons by her was Johann Christian Bach, also a well-known and successful musician in his day and apparently J.S.' favorite, since in his will he left Christian two valuable harpsichords, one a pedal model (he was a teenager when his father died). Christian went to Italy to study, converted to Catholicism (no doubt causing his staunchly Lutheran father to twirl in his grave) and then went to London, where he settled, enjoying the favor of the royal court lately deprived of Handel.

Besides being the great master of the organ, J.S. Bach was also a master of the harpsichord, also known as the cembalo, or in the German of the time, the flügel. His technique on this instrument was even greater than his organ technique. He actually was fonder of the clavichord, an older instrument than the harpsichord, but unsuitable for any purpose but small intimate groups as it played too quietly and the tone did not carry.

As has been noted earlier, the forerunner of the piano had been invented well before Bach's old age, but it wasn't at all popular or much used. It was not until the action mechanism connecting the keys and the hammers was improved that it gained popularity and it still was not like the modern pianoforte (the full name of the instrument -- 'piano' is a shortened name). The improved early model which gained popularity and which was used by Mozart and other musicians of his day, is known as a fortepiano. It had no pedals, hence the technique of playing it was more like the harpsichord or organ technique than the pianoforte. Its tone overall was less powerful but brighter in the upper registers and clearer in the lower than the pianoforte. (Hearing a Mozart piano concerto played on a fortepiano is a real revelation). The addition of the pedals around the turn of the 19th century turned the instrument into the pianoforte and revolutionized the technique since it allowed the player to hold notes with the sostenuto pedal. They were promptly built larger and strung with extra strings for a more powerful voicing, although at the sacrifice of the fortepiano's clarity of tone. Beethoven became probably the first great pianist, followed by Chopin, who was such a master of the instrument that he became a major composer in spite of the fact that he wrote virtually nothing but piano music and, in fact, knew next to nothing about any other music.

I would say wash your mouth out with SOAP, young lady. Does your mama know you go around saying things like that?

Does your mama know you go around saying things like that?

Hell, no. why do you think I've never invited her to this place?