I lived in boston for summers of 85 86 and loved this concert. Went back to USA to live in NYC late 90s for a few years and went up to Boston every 4th to catch this
Those soldiers were very impressive with the timing of the cannons, being very on cue as Tchaikovsky wrote it, as opposed to other years when it's almost random firing. More so, when you consider there's only 3 guns. Doing it live is a challenge.
That takes some major coordination, depending on how far the cannons are situated from the stage. A music sound engineer would have calibrated the cannons to go off just a few seconds early to be in sync with the symphony. Same thing with the fireworks being in sync as well. An immense amount of back-timing with the score to know when to precisely shoot off the fireworks so they explode in sync with the music again. Musically trained sound engineers make their big bucks doing this.
I really hope they’ll continue doing this in the coming years. I went once a couple years back and it was just the best - the orchestra, the cannons, the fireworks, Yah bless America!
This was such an amazing concert. I'd give anything to go back to it , the 1976 Bicentennial celebration at the Esplanade put on by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops.
I have the same song on 12” 78 from the 1940’s and it was 2 records spread into 4 parts. I played it on my 1923 Camp-Fone portable wind-up phonograph and it sounds terrific when watching the fireworks.
