A trip to the Musical Instrument Museum in Arizona offered profound and uplifting insights into the human condition, and interesting results at an instrument blind test Do you get depressed watching the news and reading Facebook? Does it feel to you that the world is imploding, with cultures at war, nations fragmenting, and ancient hatreds resurfacing? Well, I have just the tonic for you. Last week I went to Phoenix, Arizona, to give a talk at the Musical Instrument Museum, a

Facebook just kindly reminded me that two years ago today I was in Sarasota, Florida, enjoying the La Musica Festival, and tasting wine – in the name of research, of course. Here's the blog I wrote for The Strad, in April 2013: I’ve taken part in a few violin blind tests in my time, but yesterday evening I experienced my first wine one, as part of the La Musica chamber music festival in Sarasota, Florida. It was billed as an Old World, New World exploration, with six wines in

My latest interview for Cozio, with violinist James Ehnes, has just gone live, so please go and visit. He had so much to say about his experience playing some of the finest violins ever made that I couldn’t fit all of it into the interview there, so I saved some of the more philosophical questions for here. I’ve previously made the point that I don’t think everyone deserves to play a Strad and that in my experience there are many people playing them who definitely don't. How

A really interesting article about wine in the New Yorker suggests striking parallels between how we choose wine and our attitudes to instruments, demonstrating the subjectivity and inconsistency with which we demonstrate preferences. The author, Maria Konnikova, recounts taking part in Daniel Salzman's experiment. Salzman offers participants two different wines. One he says is more expensive than the other, and he explains its artisanal production techniques. The author admi