Until African elephants and hawksbill sea turtles became endangered species, instrument makers used bits of tusk and shell for their acoustic or decorative qualities. Those animals are now protected, but many of the older instruments constructed with their materials, like cellos and bassoons, are still played today. You can see how that might lead to trouble.
One famous standoff occurred in 2014, during an international crackdown on the ivory trade. Officials at Kennedy Airport in New York confiscated several bows belonging to the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s string players because they contained ivory tips, even though they were made before that was illegal.
The bows were later returned, but questions about protected materials in instruments persist. Many musicians, fearing for their instruments, which can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, have excised the contraband material. Rafael Figueroa, the principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, for example, replaced his nearly 100-year-old, $30,000 bow’s original ivory tip with a silver one, and his cello’s rosewood tailpiece with ebony.
“I have heard so many horror stories from my colleagues about having bows confiscated, even people who had the right paperwork,” Figueroa said. “It was nearly impossible to get them back.”
Not all parts of an instrument can be replaced as easily as an ivory bow tip. Last summer, the Brazilian government caused a panic when it proposed to increase international protections for an exotic, endangered hardwood tree known as pernambuco, which is used in the vast majority of string instrument bows.
As a result, thousands of pernambuco bows could be subject to confiscation in customs lines, upending an orchestral touring industry worth millions of dollars and forcing players to consider bows made from alternative materials, like carbon fiber.
The relationship between pernambuco and music is not a typical one of environmental overconsumption, however. It is the primary consumers of this resource, the bow makers, who have tried hardest to conserve the wood. In recent decades, they have worked to document legal stockpiles and trace the provenances of finished bows, and have replanted trees by the millions.
Chase Maggiano, a bow restorer at Rare Violins of New York and a staunch conservationist, said, “To put things in perspective regarding deforestation: Typically, a single bow maker in their life will use about one pernambuco tree.”
He and other bow makers led the charge against Brazil’s push to increase protections, rallying musicians around the globe as well as environmental researchers. And they succeeded. At the most recent conference of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (also known as CITES), which meets to regulate endangered species every two to three years, representatives from the United States and other nations persuaded Brazil to compromise: Instead of increasing protections across the board, strict government permits are now required for most international commercial pernambuco activity, which includes the selling or trading of bows.
The orchestral touring industry breathed a sigh of relief. Musicians can continue to travel as usual with pernambuco bows. Still, that reprieve may be temporary. The question is expected to come up at the next CITES meeting in 2028, with updated research on the tree’s status.
Until then, bow makers are working to protect the tree with a variety of programs, including a new greenhouse seedling plan, announced in June by the International Pernambuco Conservation Initiative. That effort would include planting pernambuco to help restore a key watershed destroyed by deforestation near Pau Brasil, a rural town in Bahia.
PERNAMBUCO IS NOT EASY to conserve. Brazil’s national tree, whose scientific name is Paubrasilia echinata, is persnickety in that it grows only in the sapping humidity of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest — one of the world’s most biologically diverse ecosystems after that other patch of greenery in the country, the Amazon Rainforest.
Decades of agricultural expansion led Brazil to declare pernambuco endangered in 1992. In the run-up to the change, bow makers around the world stockpiled the wood, said Rodney Mohr, a master bow maker in Ohio, who purchased about 1,000 pounds of pernambuco in 1991 from a lumber company that had imported it back in the 1960s.
“There was never a good, reliable source of wood,” Mohr said in an email. “You had to buy as much as you could when good wood was offered.”
Declaring pernambuco endangered also stirred up a lively black market that continues to this day. As Brazil and CITES increased protections on the wood, its value increased, leading to some brazen, high-tech tree poaching.
“These loggers, they sometimes go after a single tree in the middle of a forest,” said Daniel Piotto, a professor of agroforestry at the Federal University of Southern Bahia in Brazil. “I am 100 percent sure that that’s for bow making.”
Over the years, the Brazilian authorities have captured more than 150,000 bows and wooden rods. They have fined loggers, as well as bow makers who use illicitly sourced pernambuco, more than $10 million, according to a 2022 report from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
The report details several dramatic captures, including one in which smugglers sprinted through an airport to escape, with dozens of pernambuco rods spilling out of a suitcase as they ran. These stolen rods found their way abroad, prompting scrupulous bow makers like Mohr to be careful about where they buy from. He said it was common knowledge that some sellers had acquired their wood illegally.
Piotto said that the Brazilian government’s push to increase international protections for pernambuco may have been prompted by frustration at repeated thefts. He supported the latest CITES outcome, adding, “Let’s postpone this change until the next conference in Panama.”
PERNAMBUCO REMAINS the preferred material for nearly every professional string player. When the Parisian clockmaker François Xavier Tourte turned to bow making in the mid-1770s, he experimented with many different woods, settling on pernambuco, which had been used as ship ballast and in red clothing dye, because of its density and flexibility. Other bow makers rushed to copy him.
“If something better had been discovered in the last 150 years — and they’re still trying — then people wouldn’t have been so up in arms about pernambuco,” said Maggiano, the bow restorer, who earlier this year presented an exhibition of rare historical bows in New York, including some made by Tourte that are worth more than $1 million. He has had smooth customs experiences since the implementation of the new regulations in March, calling the process “more of a headache” but “worth it.”
High-end bow making is an artisanal craft, but a dwindling one, in part because of how difficult it is to source legal pernambuco. Most makers double as restorers, including Lynn Hannings, a double bass player who makes and repairs bows in Maine. She spends more time maintaining existing bows rather than creating new ones, and is the vice president of the International Alliance of Violin and Bow Makers for Endangered Species.
“There’s a reverence — we are so opposed to any illegal activity,” she said, estimating that there are only around 50 bow makers left in the United States. “There are these old-world traditions, old-world techniques in how we approach these materials. It takes a lot of time to learn how to do this properly.”
The making of carbon-fiber bows, on the other hand, has had nearly linear growth in the past 30 years, but many musicians and makers consider it a distinctly second-class material.
Many, but not all.
Bernd Müsing, a mechanical engineer who once worked in the bicycle industry as a head of research and development, makes carbon-fiber bows. He founded the German company Arcus Bows in 1999, which has grown since then to making about 2,000 bows per year from just 50. He disdains pernambuco, mainly for scientific reasons.
Tourte — known today as the “Stradivari of the bow,” a reference to the famous luthier whose instruments are worth millions today — started using pernambuco at a time when instrument makers used softer materials for strings, mostly sheep gut. (Today, they are made of cores wrapped in metal.) Müsing, who is an amateur violinist, took careful measurements and found that carbon bows travel measurably faster and smoother across metal-wrapped strings than their wooden counterparts, and that carbon has less of a damping effect on an instrument’s natural resonance.
Artists generally aren’t convinced, though some players, like the violinist Jeremy Black, concertmaster of the Grant Park Orchestra in Chicago and principal second violinist in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, have made the jump to carbon bows because of their convenience and lower price point.
“I’ve been thinking of my bow as more of a tool and less as an object that you’re artistically deeply connected with,” Black said, adding that he found using the carbon bow “a little more fatiguing, like holding an electric razor.”
THE KEY QUESTION in determining pernambuco’s future is the number of trees currently growing. It’s a hotly contested figure.
When Brazil tried to increase the wood’s protected status, it cited research that said that the pernambuco population has declined by 84 percent in the past three generations and that only about 10,000 adult trees exist today.
That research acknowledges, however, that there is a lack of reliable data.
Bow makers and researchers including Piotto, for their part, estimate that the number of trees is actually more than 2 million, based on the number they have planted. Many of those trees are growing on plantations rather in their natural forest habitat, though, which has some bow makers and scientists wondering whether the wood will be of high enough quality when it comes of age in about 20 years.
This year, public and private organizations have pledged to fund research that would include the planting of new seedlings and an accurate count and assessment of the wood’s quality, said Piotto, who remains optimistic about the plantation wood’s potential and the future of pernambuco.
“Let the federal police continue chasing the criminals,” he said. “For now, you know, we need to just let the trees grow.”
