Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - REALLY Expensive Musical Instruments

Episode Date: May 22, 2021

For a professional musician, their instrument is their livelihood. If making music is your career, it isn’t surprising that many top musicians will pay the equivalent of a new car on their instrument. However, there is a class of musician which have instruments which are far more valuable than a car. They are the price of a mansion. Learn more about the world of extremely expensive musical instruments, and why musicians play them, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For a professional musician, their instrument is their livelihood. If making music is your career, it's not surprising that many top musicians will pay the equivalent of a new car for their instrument. However, there's a class of a musician which have instruments that are far more valuable than a car. They're the price of a mansion. Learn more about the world of extremely expensive musical instruments and why musicians play them on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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When I learned how to do travel photography, I had to do it the hard way. It took years of time and lots of travel. That's why I created the Travel Photography Academy, so you can learn from me in much less time, spending much less money. It's an online video course which I shot on location in France, Spain, and the United States, and I cover everything you need to improve your travel photography. So, if you want to take your photography to the next level and get better photos on your next trip, visit Travel Photography Academy.com or click on the link in the show notes. Let me start by setting the parameters of this discussion.

I'm not talking about gimmick instruments. These would be things like a solid gold guitar or a platinum trumpet. The value in something like that would mostly be in the value of the materials which the instrument is made out of, not the instrument itself. Likewise, I'm not going to talk about musical instruments that have value because of who they were owned by. For example, a 1970 Steinway Model Z upright piano, which was owned by John Lennon, and which was used to write and record the song Imagine, once sold for $2.1 million. The Heintzeman Crystal Piano, which was used during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, sold for $3.2 million at auction. Charlie Parker's saxophone, Mile Davis's trumpet, Jimmy Hendricks guitar, and Ringo's drums have all sold at auction for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. None of them were purchased to be played, and they were all purchased to sit in a museum or in someone's private collection.

What I'm talking about today are actual instruments that are designed to be played by performers and are purchased for the purpose of performing. If you happen to be a rock and roll musician and you wanted to buy the best guitar money could buy, you could easily pay in the five-fifference. Just doing a cursor research on guitars, you can spend about $35,000 for a 1957 Fender Stratocaster solid-body electric guitar. The 1957 Stratocaster is a collector's item, but it's also considered a great guitar, and it's not impossible that someone might buy it to use it. I've also found similar prices for super high-end acoustic guitars as well. You can buy the world's most expensive guitar amplifier for much more, however.

There's a custom-built handmade Dumbled Guitar Amplifier that was made for country singer Merle Haggard. The amp was made by Alexander Dumbull, who only made $300 in his career, and the cost of the amp is $160,000. But let's say you play classical music. How much are you going to spend on your instrument? A super high-end triangle will actually set you back around $300. And yes, I'm actually serious. A high-end marimba might run you about $6,000 and a set of five timpennies. will set you back about 18,000. A fully decked out brand-new Steinway Model D grand piano will set

you back about $63,000. The brass section of an orchestra is relatively cheap. A super-expensive trumpet might run you around $8,000, a tuba might go for $15,000, and a super-expensive trombone might go for $10,000. Prices in the Woodwind section are also in the same ballpark. A high and clarinet will run you about $10,000, and it's the same as an oboe, with the catch that oboes tend to wear out faster. A professional oboist might need to get a new instrument every five years, and some do it more frequently. Flutes can go as high as $20,000 to $30,000, but they can pretty much last forever. All of this discussion so far was really a build-up to get to the string section, which is what I really wanted to talk about. The prices which are paid for the world's top violins,

violas, and cellos can be more than two orders of magnitude more expensive than most of the other instruments in an orchestra which I just mentioned. For example, Yo-Yo Ma's cello is valued at $2.4 million. Anne Aikiko Myers purchased her violin for $3.6 million. The famous violin solo as Joshua Bell plays a Stradivarius violin, which was purchased for about $4 million. And these aren't museum pieces. They actually play these instruments on a daily basis and in concerts. They travel with them and take them on planes and taxis. Even string instruments that aren't at the very top of the market can still go for many hundreds of thousands of dollars. So what's the deal?

How is it that a concert violin can go for 10 to 100 times more than a high-end instrument from almost any other section of an orchestra? Well, it all starts in the town of Cremona, Italy, which sits approximately halfway between the cities of Milan and Bologna. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, a luthier, and that's someone who makes stringed instruments, by the name of a very, Antonio Stradivari created some of the finest stringed instruments ever known to man. During his career, which lasted until he was 92 years old, he created 1,116 stringed instruments. 960 of those were violins, but he also created violas, cellos, guitars, mandolins, and harps. Cremona was known as the center of instrument making, and the Strativari Workshop was one of the best. For 300 years, musicians have believed that the instruments which came from the Strativari Workshop,

were some of the best ever made. In recent decades, tests have been done on strativarius instruments to try to figure out why they produce the sound they produce. One theory holds that the wood which was used came from trees that grew during the little ice age in Europe. This would have made the wood denser and created a better sound. Another theory holds that the instruments were soaked in a chemical bath of borax and brine to protect them from insects.

Those chemicals permeated the wood and helped with the resonance of the instruments. And others think it's just good craftsmanship. Since the creation of these instruments, the value of stringed instruments have radiated outward from the Stradivarius Workshop. Instruments made by him with the Strativarius label are worth the most. Instruments made by his family and those trained under him are worth slightly less and so on. Are Stradivarius violins really that much better? Well, there have been several tests conducted to determine just that. A French acoustics researcher named Claudia Fritz did a test in Paris,

where she brought in professional violin players and had them test six violins. The violinists were told that at least one of the six was a Stradivarius. In fact, two were Stradivarius's. One was a Guernari, was a contemporary of Stradivarius, and the other three were modern violins made in 1980. The players wore dark goggles so they couldn't see which was which. Of the 17 musicians tested, seven couldn't tell the difference, seven guessed incorrectly, and three got it right.

The highly trained violin players couldn't tell the difference. Now, some people criticize the study, saying that the musicians weren't used to playing with goggles on, so they did another follow-up study in Paris. This time they again had six violins. There were three Stradivarius and three were newer violins. They were all played behind a curtain for an audience, so no one could see which instrument was being played. The audience had 55 people which consisted of musicians, instrument makers, and other people with a trained ear. They then repeated the same study in New York with an audience of 82 people, also with experience in music.

In both Paris and New York, both audiences preferred the new violins over the Stradivarius's. So, if there's no substantial difference, why do top-level violin players spend so much money to use these old violins? It mostly has to do with branding. Having an expensive instrument means that you are almost by definition a top violin player. Only someone successful enough from touring and recording can afford to get an instrument like that or find a sponsor who will buy it. There also might be a placebo effect at work. If a musician thinks they have a great instrument, it just might make them play better. Nevertheless, despite the mounting evidence that Strativarius instruments don't really sound any better than new ones, prices keep going up.

In 2011, the Lady Blunt Strativarius violin sold for a record $15.9 million at auction. The instrument was named after its previous owner, Lady Anne Blunt. In 2016, the McDonald's Stradivarius viola, one of only 10 Strativarius violas in the world, was put up for auction with a minimum bid of $45 million. But there wasn't a bidder for it. It's probably only a matter of time until these record prices get broken. As they get more expensive, many of these instruments might get taken out of the hands of musicians and placed in museums as the cost of insurance and the risk of damage is simply too grand.

If that should happen, however, the reality is, most people probably won't even notice. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit. If you know someone you think would enjoy the show, please share it with them. Also remember, if you leave a five-star review, I'll read your review on the show. Thank you. Thank you.