A Question of Tone
For three centuries, the violins built in the northern Italian town of Cremona have been regarded as the finest ever made. The instruments of Antonio Stradivari and of his younger contemporary Giuseppe Guarneri, known as "del Gesù", are spoken of with a reverence accorded to few other manufactured objects; the best examples change hands for several million pounds, and generations of players have insisted that their sound possesses a warmth, a carrying power and an expressive range that no later maker has been able to equal. The conviction that these instruments are not merely very good but uniquely and irreproducibly excellent has hardened, over time, into something close to an article of faith.
Naturally, such a belief has invited explanation. If the old Cremonese violins really do sound better than anything made since, then something about how they were made, or what they were made from, must account for it, and a long line of investigators has set out to find that something. Some have pointed to the varnish, suspecting a lost recipe whose ingredients shaped the vibration of the wood. Others have looked to the timber itself. One widely discussed proposal held that the spruce used for the soundboards grew during an unusually cold spell in European history, a stretch of long winters and cool summers that would have slowed the trees' growth and produced wood that was exceptionally dense and even-grained. A different line of enquiry suggested that the makers had treated the wood with mineral salts or other chemicals, leaving a fingerprint that modern instruments lack.
None of these explanations, however, addressed a prior and more awkward question: whether the celebrated superiority was real in the first place. The difficulty is that almost everyone who plays or hears these instruments already knows what they are. A violinist handed a Stradivari worth millions, in front of an expectant audience, is hardly a neutral judge of its tone; the knowledge of what the instrument is, and what it is worth, can scarcely fail to colour the impression it makes. To test the belief properly, that knowledge would somehow have to be removed.
In 2012 a team led by an acoustics researcher and a violin maker set out to do exactly that. At an international competition they assembled a group of skilled violinists and asked them to play a selection of instruments, some old and Italian, some newly built, under conditions designed to keep the players in the dark, quite literally: the room was dimly lit, and each musician wore modified goggles that prevented them from seeing which violin they were holding. Asked to judge the instruments and to say which they would most like to take home, the players showed no consistent preference for the old over the new. On average the instrument they rated most highly was a modern one, and the violin they liked least was a Stradivari. When asked to guess whether a given instrument was old or new, they did no better than chance.
A larger study followed two years later, conducted near Paris with a group of accomplished soloists who were given far longer with the instruments, hours rather than minutes, and the chance to play them both in a rehearsal room and in a concert hall. Each soloist compared six old Italian violins, several of them by Stradivari, with six fine new ones. The outcome echoed the earlier experiment: the soloists, on the whole, preferred a new violin to the old favourites, and once again could not reliably tell which instruments were antique. A subsequent test moved the question to the audience, asking listeners seated in concert halls to compare old and new instruments played from the stage; they, too, tended to favour the newer violins, and could not dependably distinguish them from the old.
The findings were not received quietly. Critics argued that the experiments, whatever their ingenuity, could not capture everything that mattered. The number of instruments and of players involved was small; the particular violins chosen might not have been representative; and a brief comparison under test conditions, they suggested, was a poor substitute for the years a great soloist spends learning to draw the full range of sound from a fine instrument. Some maintained that the qualities setting the old instruments apart reveal themselves only across a long acquaintance, or only in the hands of the very greatest players, and that no blind trial of this kind could be expected to expose them. The researchers, for their part, did not claim that the old violins were bad, several were plainly excellent, only that no evidence had emerged that they were systematically better than the best of their modern rivals.
What the episode unsettled was not the quality of the Cremonese instruments but the assumption that their superiority was beyond question and beyond explanation. If listeners and players alike, deprived of the knowledge of what they are hearing, cannot pick out the old masters from well-made modern violins, then at least part of the instruments' fabled supremacy may lie not in the wood or the varnish but in their reputation, and in the expectations that reputation creates. The makers of Cremona were undoubtedly among the greatest craftsmen of their age; whether their finest instruments truly sound better than anything achievable today is a claim that, for all its long history, has yet to survive a fair test.