Phili v KAEXTVICOTT The Capitol Hill crowds have barely dispersed and the news of the first Obama-era scandal emerges - and yes, it does matter

So the first scandal of the Obama administration turns out to be a musical scandal. Witbin days of the historic inauguration, news leaked out that the music performed by a quartet featuring Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman had been pre-recorded. Although they performed the piece, a new meditation byjoim Williams on the classic Shaker song "Simple Gifts", most of the millions present for the event, and the tens of millions who watched it live on television, heard a canned version recorded before the actual swearing in.

It's in the nature of scandal that we oscillate between making too much and too little of it, exhausting our patience with the subject before coming to any perspective on the real crime. But in this instance, I'm inclined not to make too little of the deception. I think it's very bad for classical music when these things come to light, whether it's Pavarotti lip-synching a mass concert, or two of our finest string players allowing a recording to be used without making it clear from the beginning.

It was, of course, a terribly cold day. I know, because I live only a few blocks from the Capitol and I decided to spend most of the event snugly under wraps on the sofa, in front of the TV. I was impressed that the musicians managed to sound so good, look so calm and betray nary a shiver in the sub-freezing temperatures.

When you see strange things like this in Washington, you naturally assume that topsecret, government-funded technical wizardry is at work. The CIA, no doubt, has created a satellite-directed laser heat beam that can cast a cone of balmy weather wherever it is directed. But this appears not to be the case, and we should all have given up thinking the best of the CIA years ago. If they can't get basic intelligence right, they're probably not wielding magic heat beams.

After the scandal broke, various spokespeople explained it this way: that it was cold, the artists feared for the safety of their valuable and delicate instruments and chose to perform for the president and his guests on secondary instruments while beaming to the crowd a better, pre-recorded version. It wasn't quite as bad as lip-synching.

If music is bread, it shouldn't just be handmade, but made in a wood-fired oven, from organic, non-genetically modified, heirloom wheat. But even that analogy isn't quite right, because the authenticity of classical music isn't necessarily about simple connection to earthy traditions. It's an intellectual authenticity. Define authenticity. Sorry, not here in the space of a short column. Every cultural form has its own particular type of authenticity. But an essential part of the authenticity of classical music is an unshakeable belief that what you are hearing is what is being played. Different musics do different things - energise, hypnotise, bliss us out. But classical music is about the integrity of listening in real time, about listening deeply, down to the scraping of fibres on a metal string. The more technology interposes itself between the musician and the listener, the more scepticism there is about the value of deep listening.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this is a rather harsh ideology of music and casts doubt even on the value of recordings. But, I confess, I think there are a host of technical intrusions on music that are ultimately pernicious: amplification, studio editing, acoustical tampering and so on. An argument can be made, case by case, for the occasional use of each of these things. But the more the larger world has become a place of downloadable, e-mailable, iPodable music files, whipped up from the digital ether in studios that can create soundscapes with very little input from actual musicians, the more I'm convinced that the survival of classical music is all about distinguishing itself from this immaterial world of musical "products".

The music that Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman played on that cold January day was based on a song that everyone knows from its setting by Aaron Copland. The opening line is almost proverbial in America: "Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free". But I prefer a line from another verse: "And when we hear what others really think and really feel, Then we'll all live together with a love that is real."

"We hear.. .really think really feel.. .that is real". This adamantine connection between hearing and the real is the essence of the music we love.