martin swan

Thank you. I just want to make it clear that I absolutely condemn the use of unregistered wood and any attempts to smuggle it out of Brazil or to resell it. The individual who has been caught twice leaving Brazil with a suitcase of unregistered wood has brought disaster to the world of bow-making and has undermined much of his own otherwise exemplary work in conserving the species. Hempel is quite right to sense that this issue is personal for me, and I suppose I get things out of perspective. However, the fight is not against Brazil, who are quite reasonably looking for international action, even if it's all become a bit twisted and impractical. My anger is directed towards those bow-makers who through impatience, arrogance or laziness have ignored the issue of illegal wood in the supply chain, and who have brought about this absurd state of affairs. There is no justification in the current climate for the manufacture and sale of cheap pernambuco bows. Nor should any new bows be sold (even domestically) without detailed and rigorous proof of legal origin for the wood. Conversely the trade in historic bows has no negative consequence for the future of pernambuco, Brazil has no interest in restricting trade in these bows, and they should be exempt from CITES controls.

In practice CITES cannot control smuggling of pernambuco, either on the export or the import side. In your post above you conflate smuggling with over-exploitation. And no I have not just woken up - we have been dealing in CITES listed materials for decades - we also operate within the terms of the UK ivory act. Critically endangered species need protection and CITES is the principal mechanism for affording that protection. It just isn't relevant to a prolific tree species which has only one proportionally negligible commercial use.

Pre-convention (fully legal) pernambuco blanks cost on average £100 full retail, though they can be bought for a lot less. Pernambuco is not cocaine - it’s worth very little. The motivation for smuggling seems not to be primarily financial. This is not in any way to condone smuggling. It’s just important to support argument with fact, and IBAMA's maths don't add up.

You need a legally binding statement from the maker that the wood used was imported into their country of residence before 2007, and this declaration needs to be backed up by some form of foolproof inventory control/traceability system which has been approved by their local CITES management authority. Good luck with that!

They have moved the vast majority of their production to ipe. But they also have big reserves of fully CITES compliant (pre-convention) pernambuco.

There we have it in a nuttsheli. If contemporary bowmakers were able to provide clear pre-convention provenance information (as was agreed at Cop20 in 2022) then we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in today. The contention that pernambuco is critically endangered is a side issue to this fundamental problem - Brazil is only concerned about illegal wood in the supply chain. A very legitimate concern which is not being addressed …

In practice CITES cannot control smuggling, either on the export on the import side.

Yes, even a Dominique Peccatte stick in amourette would be hard to sell for anything close to what this bow went for ... Having said that the mounts are very interesting, but I still can't get close to $41,300.

Who were the experts? And did they see the violin in person or just these photos?

I guess someone didn't read the listing ...

It’s also the case that if you change the string angle and the amount of wood in the bridge, no ability to memorise tone is going to allow you to get it back to how it was by tweaking other parameters.

Well, I claim to have an infallible memory for colours. this can easily be tested by showing me a colour swatch and asking me to identify the exact shade of ochre in my study, for example. No one has ever tested me - if they did, I might discover that I’m not as clever as I think. So, to tonal colour - how would we devise a similar test? I would say it’s impossible, but maybe I’m not thinking hard enough! Re perfect pitch, what you are describing is people losing the ability they once had ie. They no longer have perfect pitch.

Not sure what the difference is between mediocre perfect pitch and excellent perfect pitch …? I don’t think there can be degrees of perfection. I was looking more for a rational proof that people with perfect pitch have a better memory for tonal colour. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but simply that I can’t see how this could ever be established, since « what something sounds like » cannot be communicated and has no objective reality.

Interesting concept … How can we prove that they remember accurately?

It's impossible, and has been since 2022. There is a zero export quota from Brazil, and there is a federal law prohibiting first export of any pernambuco. Given that pernambuco doesn't grow anywhere else, you might ask why Brazil thinks it needs CITES at all.