The next Stradivarius will be made of mushrooms
mainLast week, scientists were using health authority CAT scanners to discover the secrets of Stradivarius violins and make a modern replica.
This week, the violin world has recruited mycologists to treat instruments with Physisporinus vitreus, a white-rot fungus, in order to reproduce the conditions in which the great violins aged and matured. Read on here. That such intellectual effort should be expended in perpetuating and replicating a popular myth can be ascribed to a fixation either with profit or fairy tales. It has nothing to do with music.
Maybe it’s what Stradivari ate. I hear he was offered a dead cat one morning. You see, he interrupted me and his son Giovanni and we were… well never mind. He shoed us out of the house and demanded we leave and go get breakfast. Took us 5-6 whole minutes to find a dead cat for him. I don’t know whether he ate the cat, but he was amused by the temerity… There is this old myth about what violin strings are made out of, come to think of it.