Musica, maestra di design Music, master of design

Why does the famous contemporary violinist Uto Ughi play a Stradivari violin, made four centuries ago? In our liquid society, where many design products as fluid «flow, overflow, spread, […] trickle, drip, leak» (Baumann, 2002, p. XXII), that is they follow customs, practices, market trends, they change style according to business approaches, … the acoustic musical instruments seem to remain indifferent to concepts of addition and subtraction. For them, the result is always zero, they are balanced in shape, function, materiality, lightness, heaviness, wrapper and content. In the contemporary world, many other products include advanced technology, right material choice, perfection in construction, for example, some cars, some new smartphones, … but they have a common feature: they are not of a lasting nature, their usefulness decreases as their meaning does, because of natural aging (when the engine, the fuel, the legislation change, a car loses its meaning) or because of forced obsolescence techniques (Latouche, 2015). The acoustic musical instruments are archetypes where the necessary modifications, over time occurred, added value contributing to their re-actualization, in a peculiar way that rarely can be found in other product categories. These extremely communicative objects (music is the most universal form of communication) express their objective beauty through their completeness and, beyond social concerns, human tragedies, historic changes, linguistic evolutions they manifest themselves as a masterful example of “pure” design.