It is a story that seems designed to appeal to something deep within me: in blind tests, Stradivarius violins don’t sound any better than good modern instruments. In fact, audiences preferred the new ones.
The report, from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, follows on from studies showing that soloists couldn’t distinguish between a Stradivarius and a modern fiddle. There are several, competing satisfactions to be drawn from this. One lies in the sharp reassessment of perceived intrinsic value. Stradivariuses are expensive chiefly because they are rare: there are about 550 of them in existence. They also sound nice. But it turns out they don’t necessarily sound £10m worth of nice. Which is good, because the best-sounding instruments belong in the hands of musicians, not banks.
The study also debunks a romantic notion that, in hindsight, always seemed mind-blowingly unlikely: that with one man and his secret recipe, violin-making reached its high-water mark in the early 18th century.
You will have heard the same said about other instruments: electric guitars of a certain provenance, for example. Even the humble banjo has its Stradivarius equivalent: the 1930s original flathead Gibson Mastertone. Only about 130 of these still exist in the optimal configuration, and the sound they produce is meant to be unimproved upon. Again this seems unlikely., given how many thousands of banjos have been expensively crafted in the Mastertone’s image over the years. But what do I know? I await the results of the blind-testing with interest.
Mermaids and red herrings
To be honest, I think I like being told that Strads and modern violins sound more or less alike for the same reason I like hearing that blindfolded wine experts can’t tell red from white. I need to believe that people who purport to have highly trained senses are not to be trusted. This kneejerk cynicism on my part is every bit as unattractive as half-witted credulousness, and it springs from the same source: a misplaced confidence in one’s intuition.
The distrust of experts is a modern disease. I once got into a discussion in which I felt obliged to come out as a nonbeliever in mermaids, and the believer I was talking to said: “Of course you have to be sceptical – you’re a journalist.” But he was the more hard-working sceptic, since every argument he encountered against mermaids was attributed to a cover-up by a scientific establishment hellbent on keeping our undersea cousins a secret. From his point of view, my disbelief was the naive position. That was a long car journey.
Nowadays when the president of the United States labels the mainstream media FAKE NEWS because they report his lies, we find ourselves in similar territory: conspired against by conspiracy theorists. I feel as if I no longer possess a surefire strategy for fishing what’s left of the truth out of the murk. A “historical sense” used to be recommended for this sort of thing – the development of what the historian Lewis Namier described as “an intuitive understanding of how things do not happen”. But I’m not sure that’s enough any more.
Hard to swallow
A leaflet lands on my mat. “Did you know you are living in a hard water area?” it asks. I did not know this, and I’m not sure how I got by all these years without knowing. What could it mean? The leaflet lists such maladies as lifeless hair and scum floating in tea, and suggests I buy a £900 water softener. I confess that I had been under the impression I was reading a public service pamphlet. I wondered if the leaflet had been misdelivered, but according to the company’s website my postcode is actually an “aggressively hard water area”. All I can say is, that is not my perception.
