Million-dollar Strads fall to modern violins in blind ‘sound check’

Modern lathes are made tough, well, and often with features like CNC attachments. But the 'old iron' behemoths produced by South Bend in the 1920s are also still running and performing precise work day-in, day-out. They'll probably continue to do so for a very long time, and they'll still blow a modern introductory benchtop model out of the water.

Is it really that the old models were in some way 'perfect', or is it just that we tend to be impressed by bespoke works which continue to perform outstandingly over the ravages of time? Maybe it appeals to a sense that we could someday overcome the transience of our possessions.

I guess that's sort of an existentially futile goal to chase, but it would be nice in the context of things like batteries and plastic junk.

Indeed -- https://luisandclark.com/

I was wondering if anyone was making them out of carbon-fiber these days, and yes they are!

It's just like how it's hard to get too excited about modern art. It can either be derivative and boring or it can be outlandish trash, and nobody's giving awards to derivative and boring, so guess what you're going to see lots of.

That said much of the experimentation in classical music has been worked on and refined and yielded music which worked well later. For instance Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring sounded weird to the audience of the time, but we've come to accept it and many of its devices have been used to good effect (for instance by John Williams). One reason I think is audience have grown to accept and understand these sounds. Another reason I believe is the context. I think often we hear these together with a movie and it fits emotionally, but when we hear the music in isolation in a concert hall it we don't get it.

So, I think classical (and jazz and music in general) has always been weird and people have tried to push the boundaries and generally it's brought good results over time even though we may find it difficult to appreciate it right away or without the right context.

Your short list, like all of them, ignores the 1000 contemporaries of Beethoven who churned out trash.

Despite that (notice that I am not an expert at all), Philip Glass has a number of what he calls symphonies. Not that I like them much but there they are.

Have you listened to John Taverner? They used some of his compositions (quite appropriately, to my taste) in "Children of men".

On the other hand, writing for the screen does not need to be "soft" or "less important". The same Philip glass has some (rather good, to my taste) impressive things in the Qatsi trilogy.

Religious composers are also rather good. Have you listened to Arvo Part? Or John Rutter's Requiem? Or James Macmillan? There is good stuff there.

At the same time, notice that Philip Glass may be a minimalist but his incidental music for "The Secret Agent" or the first piece of "Naqoyqatsi" are impressive works for strings.

Well, just to give you some light.

Isn't that subjective? John Williams is quite popular, I would note. His soundtracks for Star Wars, ET, Indian Jones, etc. are well known, and catchy in my opinion.

Shostakovich was writing well into the 1970's, and was arguably the last in line of romantic, tonal, tradition.

Besides John Adams, Philip Glass and Steve Reich are still putting out stuff.

I also dug this from Rachel Grimes recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBGXinia7PY&list=PLna3_ZMkaP...

Orchestral music is a tough racket because it costs $50,000 to get an orchestra out of bed, and then you're competing against 200 years of great stuff that's in the public domain. I do think that soundtracks are where it's at for orchestral music. Music that's not simple pop had a shift from churches and courts to concert halls in the 1800s because that's where the money was, and now most people experience it in film or videogames for the same reason. Williams, Zimmer, Shore, and Elfman have all done great stuff.

Lord of the Rings, London Symphony Orchestra - https://open.spotify.com/album/3kjNIrJSKzGYZ6TD2kRErL?si=hZZ...

Extreme Make-Over, Aeolus Brass Band - https://open.spotify.com/track/7AhyCYGbpaCQF9EZF8r9y5?si=9VD...

Damascus steel was good for its time, but there are quite a few modern steels that are better suited for producing bladed weapons.

What will become of modern concrete (if reinforced, I can tell you for sure it is going to rot) and what will happen with modern steel we will see in a few hundred years.

For the record, most of the structures built in the "gold age of steel", the second part of the 19th century, like railways bridges that were once considered to be "immortal" have been largely been demolished (and replaced with new structures) because the steel became too brittle and started cracking and the same, amplified or infuced by fatigue, affects a large number of modern steel bridges as well [1].

[1] http://www.mdpi.com/2075-5309/2/4/456/pdf

Those AOL disks that you could get for free and then reformat were clearly pretty cheap, and had a high failure rate.

The same thing is true with TVs made today - TVs are generally lower quality than ones made 20 years ago (in terms of reliability and durability), but are a lot cheaper.

If you target the higher end of the quality/cost curve, you will see an improvement in quality at the same cost (or even at a lower cost)

https://www.facebook.com/notes/anna-maltese/yes-ive-seen-the...

It still is a fun trick-shot video, though. :)

How is that a reasonable suspicion? You think that no professional violinist has ever played a modern instrument? Has never made a comparison to a Stradivarius? The idea that music is "far worse" than it would have been if people were using modern violins is just laughable.

It's the original that contributes not only to sound but to the perception of the performance, because of the years that have gone by since the instruments first incarnation.

Of course, if you do it in a blind test, you aswell could simulate all the previously scanned stradivari properties, but that doesn't keep the original from being superior in idea - because it's the _original_.

YES, we can build quasi-stradivaris en masse now, but that doesn't keep the originals from being superior.

Therefore one of the main purposes of the Stradivari Violin is to show it, and announce it as such in a performance.

It's a historic thing with these instruments, not an engineering minmaxing thing.

The same effects are widely known (and disparaged) in wine tasting and other aesthetic fields, but are in my opinion somewhat misinterpreted. To make the point explicit, imagine you've been told that a steak has been aged for 40 days. They bring you into a room, blindfolded, sit you in front of this steak, and they convince you to smell it. It smells like cooked meat, alright, but also different. It's tangy, complex, dare I say a bit fungal? you begin to salivate, take a bite, and as you begin to chew they take off the blindfold. The steak is green. Disgusting! That complex fungal note deepens, sours. You interpret the flavors as barely-concealed rot, and spit out the meat, overwhelmed by a wave of nausea. Then they change the lighting in the room, and you realize it was all a trick of the light: the steak looks normal, your appetite returns, and you finish it off.

On the other side, imagine you're the chef at this very uniquely lit restaurant - and you're handed two cuts of meat to prepare. One of them is beautiful, perfectly marbled, grass-fed, and expensive. The other looks similar, but you know that it's corn-fed, from a factory farm, and artificially dyed to match the color of the other. Which do you think is going to bring out the greatest performance in the chef?

Btw, in that same world of mine, no actor would receive gazillion dollar compensation for a single movie, either, no matter how famous they were.

“The consistency of results from session to session showed that soloists could definitely distinguish one violin from another. However, the soloists seemed to prefer the new violins.”