This is a piece about the loss of skills — even ones that are marks of great beauty and mastery — due to a change in environment.
It’s an extreme example but a fun one to think through: who would play a Stradivarius violin in interstellar space?
As a way to think through an extreme environmental (not meaning climate here) change, I make the assumption that in coming centuries, whether one, five, or 10, humans will become an interstellar or extrasolar species. That is, some part of humanity will cease living in this solar system, and will instead live on other planets, space ships, or other artificial homes. I count that assumption as the less interesting part of this post and instead focus on the unintended consequences caused by a dramatic change in environment.
Let’s think through what happens to a specific type of human mastery (and by extension, a framework to apply to many others) as humans make extreme choices (like leaving earth).
Q: Who will play the Stradivarius in interstellar space or on extrasolar planets? A: No one. Longer answer below.
Today, on earth, many people achieve mastery in some skill.
We can include “common” skills such as learning your native language to fluency and skills that are innate, like learning to walk. The rarer skills I consider here require more concerted effort to acquire.
Types of skills in demand are plentiful but change over time. Some skills used to be mainstream but are now niche or largely lost except in small isolated groups, such as navigation by stars, foraging, or making clothing from scratch. Bringing those skills back to an ignorant larger population would not make sense today. Some skills are preserved by small niches of people within families or initiates (such as Chinese “face changing” or bian lian). Some are preserved widely by those who opt in by putting in the work, such as chess, forms of painting and ceramics, and musical performance.
For some of the skills with modern masters, leaving earth will mean that future humans will neither preserve those skills, nor be able to acquire them even if they wanted to.
I chose music because it is an enduring human behavior, unlikely to disappear. I chose Stradivarius violins because they represent mastery in physical instrument construction and rarity.
With only 650 instruments remaining (around 500 violins) and often sold for prices in the millions, I make the assumption that people who typically play a Stradivarius violin are violin masters whether or not they own the instrument themselves.
Here are examples related to the acquisition and maintenance of skill mastery, as demonstrated on a Stradivarius. In interstellar space.
Who Has the Skills?
Acquiring mastery in an uncommon skill takes uncommon effort.
It takes so much effort that acquiring an uncommon skill often also requires family and economic support. A small percentage of those who play the violin will pursue the instrument for over a decade of focused study and practice to have a chance to attain a level of mastery.
Those future interstellar humans’ new environment may not allow for them to put in that uncommon effort. Or, just as dangerous, where today there is a community of masters to practice and play with, in the future interstellar state, there may be so few masters that a string quartet is never possible. Less humans to practice and play with is probably assured.
A Ravine
A ravine-like global crash that eliminates all violin players, teachers, and even knowledge of classical music is a possibility. What happens when there is no place to which the players can escape, survive, and continue until the situation improves? The ravine impacts violinists regardless of location.
Without a continual string of teachers and students, mastery becomes mystery and impossible to acquire. With effort put on making humans interstellar, will there be energy left for mastery of the violin?
A Technical Ravine
Life in interstellar environments may not allow people to maintain an extreme practice regimen or to build excellent finger dexterity. There’s just no excess capacity to do so. They could in theory acquire the skills but never have time or physical capability.
Baumol
Baumol’s Cost Disease explains why certain types of work become more expensive over time. “It takes four musicians as much playing time to perform a Beethoven string quartet today as it did in 1800.” That’s without considering the amount of time to acquire mastery in playing the instruments.
In an interstellar society, while people may have excess free time, learning to play with mastery excludes people from other, more productive activities. Spending years to become a violinist has an opportunity cost that could be more extreme than today. Longer lifespans might shift that somewhat.
Anti-Baumol
It’s possible that skill acquisition advances beyond current imagination make it possible for novices to become masters overnight. If that happens and future humans value violin mastery, then perhaps it is more likely to see violin masters in the future, whether in interstellar environments or earth.
The Robots Are Objectively Better
It will certainly be possible to build a robot with equal or better manual dexterity to a human. So in the future, even if there is a ravine, perhaps the robots will be preferred as violinists and will play every Strad. Why risk the instruments in human hands?
Why Listen Live?
Why listen to live performances if, at least for classical music, there are no masters around to play live or they are worse than high-quality immersive recordings (or robots)?
It’s possible that future violinists play mostly for themselves.
In the Future No One Listens to Classical Music
Music has a shelf life. It’s long for some genres and pieces and short for others. The status quo of the classical repertoire can only be preserved for so long.
Classical Music Isn’t That Good Anymore
Consider what happened to music in the 20th century. The development of good quality microphones and electronic effects led to many new forms of music including the broad types of rock, disco, and rap. Those musical genres were created in part when musicians learned how to apply new technology. The same thing will happen again, as musicians (human or otherwise) apply music technology in new ways.
It’s possible that classical music will no longer be all that good in comparison to future music. Classical music’s popularity has been falling for the past 100 years since the genre stopped being pop music.
No Strads Remain
It’s worth considering that the original Stradivarius violins will eventually be too fragile to play. Cremona, Italy (where Stradivari worked) has been recording at high-quality the sound of each potential note of its Stradivarius violins in order to preserve that sound for posterity. Can anyone really expect to play a 1,000 year old violin?
Do the Strads Leave?
Future humans may prevent Stradivarius violins and many other other examples of earth’s artistic mastery from leaving earth. Then again, future humans may want a certain number of Strads to leave as a hedge against future destruction.
Is the Stradivarius Actually the Best Violin?
Humans are not objective in their appraisal of violins. A double-blind study of violinists (they wore goggles) playing modern and Stradivarius violins challenges the belief that Stradivarius is the best. The Strads are often valued in the millions because of their history, and most would claim, their sound. But the overwhelming majority of the violinists in the experiment preferred the modern violins. This is not to say that humans should just accept a forced preference in violin. An argument for why Strads sound (or seem to sound) better has been made from a brand perspective, of all things. It’s the same argument made for fine (expensive) art: that part of the value, maybe most of the value, comes from things that are not objective. Story and history have a big impact on value.
Considerations
- Some skills will become impossible to acquire when humans make a large environmental change. These skills are not transferable across vastly different environments and are lost.
- Skill loss happens all the time in human history, though certain events speed it up.
- Some events make skill loss impossible to undo.
- Future humans will deal with different unintended consequences if they build an interstellar society.
- Can we build a set of rules to help us assess unintended consequences from dramatic environmental changes?
