In the final installment of this extensive conversation, Professor Anna Lucia Maramotti Politi addresses some of the most pressing questions of our time. In an age marked by technological acceleration, artificial intelligence, and the ongoing transformation of production processes, what significance can activities based on slowness, listening, and craftsmanship still hold?

Cremonese violin making thus becomes the starting point for a reflection that extends far beyond the boundaries of craftsmanship and music. Through the theme of know-how, the discussion touches upon issues concerning the dignity of human work, the value of memory, and the relationship between technique and knowledge, innovation and tradition. At its core emerges a conviction that runs throughout the entire interview: technology may expand human possibilities, but it cannot replace what makes every creative experience unique and irreproducible.

The conversation concludes with a reflection on the deepest legacy of the Cremonese violin-making tradition. It is not merely an extraordinary technical expertise or an artistic heritage recognized throughout the world, but a conception of culture grounded in the dialogue between thought and action, memory and future, knowledge and responsibility.

From this perspective, violin making appears not as the nostalgic guardian of a past to be preserved, but as a living testimony to humanity’s capacity to create meaning, beauty, and knowledge. A lesson that extends far beyond the world of music and continues to challenge our understanding of time, technology, and our very idea of what it means to be human.

We live in an age dominated by speed and digital technology. Violin making, by contrast, requires slowness, attentive listening, and manual skill. Do you believe that, for this very reason, it may represent a form of cultural resistance today?

Recently, Pope Leo XIV issued the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which calls for the recovery of all those dimensions that constitute the values of humanity. Among them is art, understood as the singular expression of each creator.

Art is téchne. The term “technique,” now largely reduced to the idea of repetitive execution, originally referred in Greek to knowing how to do. Do we not speak, after all, of the “violin maker’s know-how”? This is certainly not a repetitive activity, since every instrument is unique and possesses its own distinctive timbre. Violin making is an art because the timbre of the instrument is, in every sense, an integral component of music. I have already alluded to this point.

But let us turn to the notion of slowness. What is slowness? Is it measured according to productivity and profit? That would be a mistake.

How can one fail to recall Zeno of Elea’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, later revisited by contemporary epistemology? Within the objectives of artificial intelligence, where would violin making be situated? Better still, would it even find a place of its own?

Music is the daughter of memory, just as all the arts are. Once again, we find ourselves returning to classical culture. Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses. Without the past, there can be no future.

There exists a dialectic between past and present, and between present and future, from which no human expression can escape. Time, with its rhythms and its varying tempos, is not only a component of this relationship—which we might define as intergenerational—but also an intrinsic characteristic of every artifact, or more precisely, of every entity.

If time is intrinsic to a musical composition—the piece has a duration—then the quality of time determines its expressive character. Consider the performance indications attached to a composition: adagio, allegro, and so forth. Tempo markings in music define both the character and the beats per minute of a piece. Yet one must remember that such indications also confer aesthetic value.

The same is true of every violin maker. Each has his or her own rhythm and pace.

Listening is an essential component of memory because it accumulates information—not in order to construct a database, but to foster human creativity, both individually and collectively. Listening is one of the foundations of culture. In violin making it assumes an especially important role because the ear is educated through listening.

And what of manual skill? Is it merely the attribute of yesterday’s and today’s laborers? Too often the hand has been reduced to the status of a tool. In truth, the hand possesses its own intelligence because it provides information, because it chooses how to act before it acts, and because every hand possesses its own technique. I have already touched upon this subject as well.

Therefore, slowness, listening, and manual skill should not be understood as forms of cultural resistance. Rather, they demonstrate that every art—or, more accurately, every artist—has its own pace, its own way of relating to work, and its own methods of execution. These qualities are inherent in personality itself, which deserves respect.

(A.L. Maramotti Politi and E. Ravina, Saper Fare Liutario [The Violin Maker’s Know-How], Gorizia, Edizioni della Laguna, 2017.)

After decades of teaching and research, what do you believe is the most important lesson that the Cremonese violin-making tradition can still offer to the contemporary world, even beyond the realm of music?

In light of what has been said so far, one constant remains: the necessity for human beings to be conscious of their own dignity as thinking, willing beings and as custodians of memory.

The musical string bears witness to this. Violin making confirms the perspective to which I have repeatedly referred. In this regard, I would refer readers back to the previous installments, which—although only in summary form and without developing all the necessary arguments—touch upon the role of philosophy and mathematics, neither of which can be subordinated to technique or pragmatism.

Technology and technique are, and must remain, instruments serving the human person and human society. Values must be sought while safeguarding thought in all its dimensions, freeing it from ideology and unexamined assumptions.

We must return to the path indicated by the monochord, attentive to the intentional relationship between thought and being.

At this point, however, I feel obliged to pause and return to a theme that is more immediately accessible and universally shared.

In the search for values, music must not be excluded. On the contrary, it demonstrates unequivocally that it is not merely entertainment or diversion. Music bears witness to human emotions, which find between one note and the next the space to be awakened and expressed. Yet emotions are not mere perceptions; they are profound signs of our humanity.

Despite the diversity of human characteristics, there remains a fundamental unity of the self.

For this reason, I find it very difficult to separate the art of violin making from the art of music. Beyond the analogies between the harmony of an instrument’s form and musical harmony; beyond the indispensable role of the instrument in making music; beyond their shared relationship with history—the two arts call to and sustain one another without ever becoming confused with one another.

I believe it is therefore necessary to recall once more the significance of the monochord, not merely as an experiment, but as an experience that transcends experimentation itself. It points toward a logical coherence revealed through mathematical inquiry, a coherence that led many twentieth-century mathematicians and epistemologists to engage with the question of mathematical realism through references to sound and music.

Finally, I would like to return to the relationship between Cremona and violin making.

Cremona should not simply be regarded as the city of the violin. Rather, it should be recognized as the capital of violin making and music.

One must not separate what, once divided into parts, would no longer be fully intelligible.