The role of the old 'genius-stradivari' violin is to impress by its own history - not by its sound.
Of course can the Stradivari be 3d scanned and be analysed to death and be rebuit as an 'even better sounding' facsimile, but that totally misses the point:
When someone plays an 300 Year old instrument, the ooze of connotation to that history alone is enough to elevate the performance.
These instruments don't sound the way they did 300 years ago. It's reasonable to suspect the fetish surrounding older instruments results in far worse music while also preventing people from hearing what music actually sounded like 300 years ago.
I believe the parent was suggesting that by bringing about a heightened awareness and respect for the continuity of history of classical music embodied by the violin (heck, that very same piece being played may have been first played on that same violin, in some cases), it (can) elevate both the reception of the audience, and, more importantly, the confidence, acuity, and sheer weight of emotional expression in a performer, in a way that a known reproduction never could.
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?
It's not a 'fetish' - it's 'History'.
An old Stradivari Violin, 300 Years old, built by a near-genius-enginner, being played _Now_ is a much better experience than if they would use a 3d printed clone of it.
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.
I don't see any reason to limit yourself to imitation. Build a better violin and and you get a better violin. Imitate a Stradivari and you get something that sounds like a Stradivari, but does not improve upon the original.
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.
Ahh, but fashion is pervasive. When people assume something should be better they perceive it as better. Further modern instrument design is designed to appeal to people that are so influenced.
Thus, modern instruments also suffer from the same effect and we need blind evaluation to create more objective assessments across generations of musicians and instruments. Much like how hiding the musicians physical apreace changes how people rate them.
Right. Why play an acoustic instrument when we can accurately synthesize its sound, or use a tube amplifier when we could use a digital modelling amplifier that perfectly simulates it? Because nostalgia is one of the enjoyable aspects of music. That being said, one should realize that paying for nostalgia isn't necessarily paying for objectively better performance.
The role of the old 'genius-stradivari' violin is to impress by its own history - not by its sound.
Of course can the Stradivari be 3d scanned and be analysed to death and be rebuit as an 'even better sounding' facsimile, but that totally misses the point:
When someone plays an 300 Year old instrument, the ooze of connotation to that history alone is enough to elevate the performance.