Comment on Richard Sennett's "The Craftsman"

Sennett talks about the loss of Stradivari's and Guarneri's genius in lutherie, attributing the loss to the demise of their respective workshops. He says that attempts to replicate their instruments, "proceeds on three fronts: exact physical copies of the instruments' form; chemical analyses of the varnish; and work that reasons backward from the sound (the idea here being that one could copy the sound in instruments that do not look like a Strad or a Guarneri)." And reasons that, "Missing in these analyses is a reconstruction of the workshops of the master."

He argues that "the thousand little everyday moves that add up in sum to a practice" are what made those instruments the inimitable works that they are. Of course it is easy to believe that there is plenty of truth in that. But what about the MATERIAL? Wood is a living material. No two pieces of wood are any more identical than two persons' fingerprints are. Maybe someone should look into where Stradivari and Guarneri obtained their wood. Perhaps there was some climate anomaly that affected the trees that were eventually harvested for their instrument stock.