I'm probably reading too much into this here.

Despite having voted for someone else, and having serious misgivings about the policies I expect to come out of the Obama administration, I hoped I'd enjoy watching the Inauguration.  

And I did. I did enjoy it.

 (I'm glad we watched Internet video and listened to NPR audio -- the children were spared the distraction of having to hear the jeering at the outgoing president.  I try to keep expectations of respectful behavior towards anyone high in our home.)

One of the highlights was the performance by Itzhak Perlman, Gabriela Montero, Yo-Yo Ma, and Anthony McGill, of a piece arranged for the occasion by John Williams.  Wow!  That's star power!  We were really sorry that our audio didn't match up with our video while we watched that, because we felt we couldn't appreciate their musicianship quite as well with their fingering not synced with the music.

Turns out it didn't matter:

The somber, elegiac tones before President Obama’s oath of office at theinauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.

The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday’s ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the president’s swearing in (which had problems of its own).

“Truly, weather just made it impossible,” Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. “No one’s trying to fool anybody. This isn’t a matter of Milli Vanilli,” Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because the duo did not sing on their album and lip-synched in concerts.

How cheesy is that?

OK, so it was cold.  Nobody expects string instruments to perform well in such extreme conditions.  So why try to pretend that thy can?  

We can give the new president his own super-secure Blackberry channel, and we can't put four musicians in a heated tent with a camera feed straight to the Jumbotrons and MSNBC?

Image.  Image.  Image.

Remember this the next time something seems too good to be true.

“I really wanted to do something that was absolutely physically and emotionally and, timing-wise, genuine,” Mr. Ma said. “We also knew we couldn’t have any technical or instrumental malfunction on that occasion...."

Have some cake, Mr. Ma.  Eat it too.

And what a lost opportunity here:

Mr. Ma said he had considered using a hardy carbon-fiber cello, but rejected the idea to avoid distracting viewers with its unorthodox appearance.

Let me get this straight.  We could have had a real performance in real time, the technology exists, but it was rejected in favor of a faked performance because reality with better technology would have been too distracting.

Damn that reality.  Gets in the way of a good show.

I think a carbon-fiber cello would have been cool.

Comments

[mrsdarwin]

No wonder the audio was so good on Youtube.

I thought I'd heard he had a carbon-fiber cello made? I was looking at the cello in the video thinking, "Wow, that's an amazing replica!" Now my faith in mankind is shattered.