The Violin Nobody Could Pick Out

Antonio Stradivari worked in Cremona, in northern Italy, and died in 1737. His violins from the first decades of the eighteenth century, along with those of Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù, are the most valuable instruments in the world, and for about two hundred years people have tried to explain why they sound better than anything made since.

The explanations are a genre of their own. A lost varnish recipe. A chemical treatment of the wood against rot or woodworm. Timber that grew unusually slowly and densely during the cold decades of the late seventeenth century. Each has had its advocates, its experiments and its headlines. All of them try to explain a difference in sound, and all of them skip a prior question: is there a difference that players and listeners can detect when they do not know which instrument they are hearing?

In September 2010, during the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, Claudia Fritz, an acoustics researcher in Paris, and Joseph Curtin, a violin maker from Michigan, set out to ask it. They gathered six violins. Three were new, by contemporary makers. Three were old: two by Stradivari and one by Guarneri del Gesù. The old ones were worth roughly a hundred times as much as the new.

Twenty-one experienced violinists, among them jurors and contestants, played the violins in a dim hotel room. They wore modified welders' goggles so they could not see what they were holding, and a dab of perfume on each chinrest masked any telltale smell. The researchers in the room did not know which violin was which either. That is what makes a test double-blind: neither side can steer the result, deliberately or otherwise.

The results, published in 2012, were uncomfortable for the legend. The violin most often preferred was new. The one least often preferred was a Stradivari. Asked which they would take home, most players chose a new instrument. And most could not tell whether the violin they liked best was new or old.

The objections came quickly, and some were fair. A hotel room is not a concert hall. A short session is not how anybody learns an instrument; a great violin may reveal itself over months. Six instruments are a tiny sample. And one of the authors makes new violins for a living.

So they did it again, and better. In a study published in 2014, ten internationally established soloists tested twelve violins, six new and six old, five of the old ones by Stradivari. They had long sessions in a rehearsal room and in a 300-seat concert hall, and were asked to choose an instrument to replace their own for a hypothetical concert tour. Six of the ten chose a new one. As a group they could not reliably tell old from new.

Then they tested the audience. In a study published in 2017, listeners in Paris and New York heard old and new violins played in a hall, with and without an orchestra. They generally preferred the new violins and judged them to project better, and they too could not reliably tell which were which. Projection, the ability to reach the back of a hall, was supposed to be the quality the old instruments held in reserve.

What do the tests show? Not that Stradivari's violins are poor. They are superb instruments, and in every study some players chose an old one. What the tests show is that the gap between them and the best modern violins, as heard by players and listeners who do not know which is which, is very hard to find. Differences between individual instruments, and between individual players' tastes, turn out to be larger than any difference between old and new.

That leaves the price to explain, and the price is not a measurement. In June 2011 the 1721 Lady Blunt Stradivari sold at an online auction for about 15.9 million dollars, raised for tsunami relief in Japan. What was sold was history, rarity and a name, and those are real things worth paying for. The tests only show that the sound is not where the money is.