Musical Instruments as Iconic Objects

How do some objects maintain iconic power over centuries? To answer this question, I consider an extreme case from western classical music: the violins and cellos made by Antonio Stradivari in the 17th century (Strads). Compositional styles and musical practices have changed dramatically since Stradivari’s time, but the instruments he made are still widely believed to produce the ideal sound, and they maintain an unquestionable status as peerless creations. Repeated attempts have been made to determine whether the superiority of the Strad sound is real or imagined, including double-blind experiments that found that audiences and players have difficulty distin-guishing Strads from modern instruments. Yet the reverence for Strads remains. String players covet them, and they are famous beyond the music world through press reports about their theft, recovery, and narrow escapes from destruction.

Drawing on a discourse analysis of interviews, media coverage, and archival materials, I argue that the exceptional longevity of Strads’ symbolic power comes from their combination of material and sonic iconicity, and that their aura of sacrality is maintained through several mutually reinforcing social processes. To trace how Strads became iconic, I employ Alexander’s (2020) model of the performativity of objects. Generations of musicians and instrument dealers established the Strad sound as the ideal tone and shaped the perception of these instruments as exceptionally precious and beautiful works of art. To explain how Strads remain iconic, I employ Whitaker and Greenland’s (2021) concept of the dual nature of the artwork. I demonstrate how the market value of Stradivarius instruments continues to rise because it is anchored by their artistic value, which only increases as their discursive depth expands. By approaching musical instruments as objets d’art, the analysis suggests new directions for future research in icon theory and in music sociology.