Kudos to Alice Robb at the New Republic for letting us in on the following:
A paper1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers led by Claudia Fritz, an acoustics expert and professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, asked ten renowned violin soloists to select which of 12 violins they would take on an imaginary concert tour. Half of the violins were made by Stradivarius or another 18th-century Italian master, while half came from contemporary European or North American makers (whose identities aren’t revealed in the paper). The volunteers—including Russian virtuoso Ilya Kaler and former London Symphony Orchestra soloist Susanne Hou—had two opportunities to try out the violins, once in a rehearsal room and once in a 300-seat concert hall.
After spending two and half hours playing around on the different instruments, six out of the ten musicians chose one of the modern violins for the hypothetical tour—and only three picked a Stradivarius. The two most-preferred violins were both contemporary; the least-preferred was a Stradivarius. Fritz also had the violinists guess whether each instrument they played was old or new—and they guessed right just about half the time.
Alice doesn’t bother to say how much a new violin costs, but a (very) quick search suggests that a high-quality fiddle is going to set you back about three or four Gs. So it’s hard to imagine paying more than $10,000 for new fiddle, even if it’s custom-made, as compared to a million-plus for a Strad.
I believe it was Charles Darwin who first talked about the narcissism of small differences—that, for example, since women tend to have less facial hair than men, the less facial hair a woman has, the more “feminine,” and thus the more desirable, she becomes. It’s becoming increasingly clear that much connoisseurship is the narcissism, not of small differences, but of nonexistent ones. I recently blasted Felix Salmon for insisting that “great” wines really are great even after acknowledging that every blindfold study shows that even the most recognized œnophiles, when blindfolded, actually prefer $5 wines over Chateau Lafite-Rothschild!2
