Last Saturday I assisted the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal fabulously performing Brahms’s 1st Symphony. While reading through the printed program before the concert, one little footnote struck my attention: the detailed list of the 1st violins’ instruments including the luthier’s names and year of construction. Bergonzi 1744, Pietro Guarneri 1728, Carlo Tononi 1700 etc. Back home I calculated the average age of all listed instruments and got an impressive 261 years! Carlo Tononi’s perfectly crafted violin is 317 years old and still producing brilliant sounds. The average lifespan of a smartphone carrying on the violin’s sound is 4,6 years. Compare the two pieces of hardware and realize that the violin is 69 times (!) older than the ridiculously short living smartphone. To better understand this gap, I multiplied my own age of 47 years with the same factor of 69 and got thrown back to 1222 B.C., the golden age of ancient Egypt! Listening Brahms on my iPhone is somewhat like walking hand in hand with an Egyptian pharaoh. Sustainability sounds different.