Bow-syncing?
There's been a lot of flap in the media lately about Yo-yo Ma and Itzakh Perlman supposedly "lip syncing" since the version most of us (Including the 2 million folks on the Greens) heard was actually recorded from the night before, and at the actual Inauguration the musicians just played in sync with themselves. Yet play they did, as anyone watching the Inauguration could tell.
There was a very good reason for doing so.
The first concerns cold temperatures. By all accounts it was very close to freezing by the time they played, and musical instruments are very sensitive to temperature changes. String instruments will go out of tune within minutes when faced with a drastic temperature change (say, from the 68 degree when tey tune before actually going out) to the frigid temps in place at the inauguration site. In those conditions, less than halfway through the Williams piece both string instruments and the piano would have been so badly out of tune that even with the mastery of the players to compensate for that by fingering higher or lower would have changed their masterful playing into a high-school recital.
The second concerns accessibility to such large throngs; miking the instruments live would produce a dreadful Doeppler-effect, perceivable both by those close by (the Presidential Party) and the media covering it.
So the soundtrack we got was of the previous night's recording, and at the inauguration the musicians played in sync with themselves. Only those closest to their platform heard the acoustic waves produced by Itzakh and Yo-Yo and their two co-interpreters in the Williams piece, and probably by halfway through the piece it may have started sounding bad.
The rest of us, whether on the Mall, or online, or on the newsfeed, got the prior night's recording.
A perfectly legitimate way, in my view, to handle both the Doeppler-effect problem and the annoying temperature-related tuning loss.
The media likening it to Milly Vanily's problem is just another way to show their ignorance. Thankfully some networks (including, to their credit, CNN and PBS) correctly identified the reason.
There was a very good reason for doing so.
The first concerns cold temperatures. By all accounts it was very close to freezing by the time they played, and musical instruments are very sensitive to temperature changes. String instruments will go out of tune within minutes when faced with a drastic temperature change (say, from the 68 degree when tey tune before actually going out) to the frigid temps in place at the inauguration site. In those conditions, less than halfway through the Williams piece both string instruments and the piano would have been so badly out of tune that even with the mastery of the players to compensate for that by fingering higher or lower would have changed their masterful playing into a high-school recital.
The second concerns accessibility to such large throngs; miking the instruments live would produce a dreadful Doeppler-effect, perceivable both by those close by (the Presidential Party) and the media covering it.
So the soundtrack we got was of the previous night's recording, and at the inauguration the musicians played in sync with themselves. Only those closest to their platform heard the acoustic waves produced by Itzakh and Yo-Yo and their two co-interpreters in the Williams piece, and probably by halfway through the piece it may have started sounding bad.
The rest of us, whether on the Mall, or online, or on the newsfeed, got the prior night's recording.
A perfectly legitimate way, in my view, to handle both the Doeppler-effect problem and the annoying temperature-related tuning loss.
The media likening it to Milly Vanily's problem is just another way to show their ignorance. Thankfully some networks (including, to their credit, CNN and PBS) correctly identified the reason.