 Artists
and instrument makers have banded together to rescue Brazil’s imperiled
pernambuco, the source of bows for violins, violas and cellos
Saving the
Music Tree
BY RUSS RYMER
The office of the botanical research station of the Center
for Cacao Research, a farmer’s cooperative outside Porto Seguro,
Brazil, is a small, whitewashed and mud-spattered cinder
block house with bare tile floors and a poster on the wall
that welcomes visitors with a helpful hint: “If bitten, go
straight to hospital. Remember to take the snake with you
for identification.” The five visitors who paused in front of
this placard on a balmy midwinter morning in June 2002,
though not wearing the rubber boots highly recommended
by another poster “to prevent accidents with snakes,” were
undeterred. They had come a long way, two of them from as
far as Germany, and there was something on the grounds
they wished to see. Led by the center’s director, José Roberto
de Melo, the men ambled up the wide dirt drive past a row
of greenhouses and through a grassy field dotted with spreading
trees, and then down a fire road into the forest. Soon,
even that avenue gave out, and the men struck off through
the brush single file along a winding and barely discernible
trail. Two of the cooperative’s workers took up the lead,
wielding machetes and wearing regulation high rubber boots,
and another brought up the rear, alert for predators and, of
course, cobras.
To enter a Brazilian rain forest is to trade one sensory
realm for another. The trees close in high above and a twilight
descends on the forest floor, and the world of sight
quickly gives way to one of sound. The effect is eerily like
the dimming of house lights in a concert hall in the moments
before the musicians begin to play. As the men
walked, the swooshing of vegetation threw a whispering
shadow around their steps and the echoing chatter of parakeets
and the call of crickets sparkled like stars in a firmament.
When the men had spent most of an hour on the trail,
de Melo stopped and laid his hand proudly against the trunk
of a large tree. “Here,” he proclaimed. “Do you recognize
it?” To the untrained eye, the tree’s gray-splotched bark
seemed little different from that of myriad other trees the
group had passed, and its lowest identifying leaves were lost
in the stratosphere of the canopy. But the visitors did indeed
recognize the tree immediately: an especially large and old
specimen of Caesalpinia echinata, known commonly as pernambuco
or pau-brasil.
The visitors had an intimate connection with this species.
They were archetiers, craftsmen who make bows for violins,
violas, cellos and basses, and wood from the pernambuco
tree is the only known material, synthetic or natural, out of
which a bow maker can construct a top-quality, performance level
bow. For centuries, trees like this one had been harvested
from the Brazilian forest and shipped to Europe and
North America to be turned into bows. These particular bow
makers, though, had not come to harvest the  tree. They’d
come to save it. Pau-brasil is today becoming scarce, so
scarce that wood dealers must trek deep into the forest, just
as these men had done, to find the remaining mature specimens.
So scarce that international organizations have been
debating measures to restrict the wood’s use worldwide. And
so scarce that bow makers from around the world have mobilized,
starting an organization called the International Pernambuco
Conservation Initiative (IPCI), with the mission of
rescuing the species. In the process, they hope also to rescue
their profession.
Jostling through the underbrush, the bow makers gathered
around the old trunk like siblings posing at a family reunion,
and a camera flash thundered through the twilight.
the bow is the Cinderella of the orchestra, the overworked
and overshadowed helpmate of its more glamorous
partners. Few people, even among lovers of classical music,
think of the bow as an instrument in its own right, but players
of stringed instruments know better. “Some people
think a bow is only wood and hair,” says Günter Seifert, violinist
with the Vienna Philharmonic and head of the
Wiener Geigen Quartet. “But the bow can be more essential
to expressing the soul of the music than the violin is.” For
this reason, pernambuco bows are used by almost all seri
ous orchestral and chamber musicians, whether they be professionals
or amateurs, and by most advancing students,
who learn early in their education that “it’s better to have a
fine bow and a mediocre violin than a fine violin and a
mediocre bow.” Seifert notes that some virtuosos often play
on a range of instruments but insist on a single favored bow.
A bow may be favored for many reasons. Daisy Jopling,
35, a violinist in Triology, an avant-garde string trio based in
Vienna, Austria, has sat on her fragile 150-year-old German
bow, and in the heat of one mid-rehearsal argument (a hallmark
of the trio’s creative ferment in its formative years), she
even threw it. So she respects it, first of all, for not breaking.
But she also remembers the first time she laid it on her violin’s
strings. “Friends, when they heard me playing, said,
‘What’s happened to you? You could never have played that
passage that way before!’ You see, it’s only a bow. But it
changes things.”
Other players might quibble with such claims, though
their qualifying tends to reinforce the rule. “People who say
that the bow is more important than the instrument, this I
don’t believe,” says cello virtuoso Heinrich Schiff. “Sometimes
you depend on the bow more than the cello. Sometimes
it’s the other way around.” This from a man whose cellos
are Antonio Stradivari’s 1711 “Mara” and Domenico
Montagnana’s 1739 “Sleeping Beauty,” two of the most
revered instruments in the world.
On November 24, 2002, Schiff lugged his Sleeping Beauty
onto the stage of the venerable Konzerthaus in Vienna to
play a Bach suite and other selections in a concert that also
featured the Wiener Geigen Quartet and Triology. The
Konzerthaus is one of the preeminent domains in the music
world, and the night’s performers were among that world’s
celebrities, but the declared stars of the evening were the
pernambuco bows the performers were using. Seifert debuted
his composition “The Pernambuco Waltz,” and before
the intermission, the lights stayed low and taped calls of
Brazilian jungle birds filled the hall as an image flashed on a
screen over the stage: a photograph of the five men posing
beside a pau-brasil tree in a forest half a world away.
Those same bow makers were now seated in the audience.
One of them, Klaus Grünke, took the podium to incite in
the general public, for the first time, the urgency bow makers
have been feeling for years. “We have the chance now to
react and serve as an example for others, a chance that may
never come again,” he said. “All of us, musicians, bow makers,
instrument makers and music lovers alike, have profited
from the wood pernambuco for centuries. It is time to give
nature something back.”
Klaus Grünke, 46, is one of IPCI’s founders. He lives in
Bubenreuth, Germany, a small village north of Nuremberg
that is a center of instrument making. His shop is a clean,
functional space, heated with a wood stove and lit with
north-facing windows. A profusion of chisels, planes and
knives inhabits the workbenches, and a basement storeroom
holds a cache of seasoning pernambuco wood, already cut
into bow sticks. As befits the atelier of a traditional craftsman,
the Grünke shop is multigenerational; Klaus’ father,
Richard, and his brother, Thomas, work at adjacent benches.
Atoy bench sits between them, scaled to the early efforts of
Thomas’ 3-year-old son, Raphael, and 5-year-old daughter,
Lilian. But the lineage is more than familial. An apprentice
from Brazil also works there under Klaus’ tutelage, and former
apprentices include Thomas Gerbeth, now a master
maker in Vienna and the organizer of the November benefit
in the Konzerthaus.
Bow makers are far flung and work independently. But
they share a common genealogy, going back more than 200
years to another atelier, set beside the Seine in Revolutionera
Paris, where the modern instrument bow was invented
by an artisan named François-Xavier Tourte. According to
sketchy historical documentation, Tourte was a lifelong illiterate
and an avid fisherman who brought skills to the bow
trade he’d learned during his earlier apprenticeship as a
clockmaker. There were bows before Tourte, of course—
they’ve been applied to stringed instruments since the reign
of the caliphs in Arabia in the seventh and eighth centuries,
and those used during the Baroque period preceding Tourte’s
time have many similarities with the modern bow. But Tourte
compiled a series of innovations—most his own but some
from others—into something new and powerful. His model
was concave, with the wood bent into its shape over dry heat
in a process called cambering. It had a higher head than earlier
bows, to hold the horsehair away from the stick; a ferrule,
or metal ring, to press the hair into an even, flat band;
and a screw mechanism to draw it to the desired tension for
playing. Most important, Tourte standardized every measurement
of the bow, determining the optimum dimensions
and weights, the logarithmic curve and precise taper of the
stick. His invention earned him the honorable nickname
Stradivari of the Bow.
Many string players consider that faint praise. In concert,
the delicate interplay of materials, strength, resilience and
balance that Tourte worked out gives performers a magical
tool, allowing them to both dance and dig, to execute delicate
and difficult phrasing, bouncing off the string with a
strong attack in one place and, in another, settling into the
string to draw the sound out of the instrument’s belly. That
sound emanates in part from the bow, for in addition to its
acrobatic talents, the bow resonates. Its frequencies interact
with the instrument’s own to create a distinctive tone.
(“It’s 50 percent of your sound,” Jopling says.) This constellation
of virtues spurred Giovanni Battista Viotti, the 18thcentury
violin virtuoso who is rumored to have consulted
with Tourte on the bow’s formulation, to declare: “Le violon,
c’est l’archet”—“the violin, it is the bow.” The bow is so crucial
that much of the music of Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert
and their musical heirs would not be performable without it,
at least not in a way we’re used to hearing.
“For modern techniques, the modern bow is required,”
says Rudolf Hopfner, director of the instrument collection in
Vienna’s Kunsthistorische Museum. He presides over an extensive
collection of wind, keyboard and stringed instruments
there, and of bows, including those of the Baroque and modern
periods as well as the “transitional period” that fell between
them and ended with the advent of Tourte. “The
Baroque bow is superior to the modern bow for the music of
its time,” he says. “But if you think of Paganini and all the
tricks of his day, you couldn’t get that bounce and ricochet
with the Baroque bow. Just as you can’t play the chords of
Brahms or Sibelius with a transitional bow. Their music has a
drama and power that can only be achieved with a Tourte.”
Fine bows are among the last few non-ornamental items
in Western life produced by hand by an individual, not out of
nostalgia but because that remains the best and fastest way
to produce them. Bow makers work today very much as
Tourte worked, with tools and techniques passed from master
to apprentice through the generations. The apprenticeship is
as arduous as the bow’s standards are rigorous, and only a relative
handful of craftspeople ever become master makers. In
addition to reinventing the bow, Tourte may be said to have
established the working standards for a nascent profession.
Just as his bow has come down through two centuries without
significant alteration, so, too, has the job of the archetier.
Those centuries may be coming to a close.
on an early Sunday morning in the fall of 2001, a year
before the Vienna concert, Klaus Grünke and Josef Gabriel, a
fellow bow maker from Germany, stood in a light rain outside
the locked doorway of a Beaux-Arts building near the Parc
Monceau in Paris, waiting tensely. Soon, other bow makers
began arriving, greeting each other in French and Spanish and
English and German and Portuguese. Someone produced a
key to the building, and the group filed upstairs to take seats
around an enormous boardroom table. The table belonged to
Comurnat, an organization that forges a vital link between
the conservation of wild species and their commercial use by
enlisting craftspeople into the cause of the materials they depend
on. Comurnat’s founder and director, Marco Ciambelli,
has an intimate understanding of the plight of such craftspeople—
his family had been tortoiseshell workers in Italy and
France for generations before the material was restricted in
1989 to protect the sea turtle, which caused the atelier
Ciambelli gradually to collapse. Through that business, and
even before he started Comurnat, Ciambelli was acquainted
with bow makers; for centuries they had used tortoiseshell in
some of their finest bows. In the fall of 1999, he met with a
small group of French bow makers in a Montparnasse café to
relay a concern. He had learned that CITES—the Convention
on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna
and Flora—might soon consider listing pernambuco on one
of its appendices. CITES puts the weight of international law
enforcement behind the conservation of plants and animals
by regulating their international trade. Placing any species on
the most severe of its three appendices would make its commercial
use as restricted as that of ivory and tortoiseshell.
Ciambelli strongly suggested to the bow makers that, given
the risk to their profession, they should organize and find
concrete ways to advance the conservation of pau-brasil. The
result was the conservation initiative, IPCI.
Although CITES has not, as of early 2004, listed the pernambuco,
the bow makers’ fears of losing the use of the wood
remain strong. At the meeting in Comurnat’s offices in the
fall of 2001, debates over the fine points of strategy and
budgeting were made all the more urgent by a sense that the
stakes could not be higher. “Well,” Grünke had said to
Gabriel as they stood in the rain waiting for things to get
started, “today we find out if the profession is to survive.”
Before the conversation in the café, the profession had
been sailing along peacefully with little warning that an iceberg
lay in its path. Bow making was in fact enjoying a renaissance,
after the damage inflicted by the upheaval of two world wars.
The wars had fractured the old European bow-making dynasties,
whose secrets were in danger of being lost forever. Since
the 1980s, though, a new generation of archetiers has rescued
that knowledge by apprenticing itself to the last of the oldtime
masters. The younger men and women have since mentored
each other and set about producing some of the best
bows ever made. New bow-making centers have sprung up in
villages where nothing of the sort existed before the wars:
Bubenreuth, Germany, and Domingos Martins and Guarana,
in Brazil. Port Townsend, Washington, a seaside town on the
Olympic Peninsula, has by happenstance become (along with
nearby islands) the home of Charles Espey, Paul Siefried, Ole
Kanestrom, Chris English, Morgan Anderson, Peg Baumgartel,
Robert Morrow and enough other legends and strivers in
the trade to make it the undisputed center of American bow
manufacture.
even before the refinements of François-Xavier
Tourte, bow makers used a host of valuable materials: pearl,
ivory, silver and gold, silk, ebony, whalebone and tortoiseshell.
When tortoiseshell was listed by CITES, it was easy for
bow makers to give it up because its use was entirely ornamental.
The same went for elephant ivory, for which bow
makers substituted fossilized mastodon tusk. But one material,
the wood for the stick itself, was irreplaceable. “
People think gold is precious,” Charles Espey, 57, once
told me. “It isn’t. You just go to the store and ask for it. The
stick is a different story. You’d go to the ends of the earth and
crawl on hands and knees to get that stick.”
Tourte didn’t have to go to those extremes, though he
conducted quite a search to find the perfect wood. It is said
he combined his fishing trips along the Seine with visits to
RUSS RYMER, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, is at work on
his book Out of Pernambuco (Houghton Mifflin), due out in 2005.
the wharves, where he scavenged slats from New World
packing crates and the staves of sugar barrels with which to
experiment. Only pernambuco displayed the proper range
of beneficial properties: in addition to its springiness, density
and strength, it was workable, readily adopting a curve
when heated and holding the curve seemingly forever.
The wood does have its drawbacks. It can be thorny and
twisted, and is often too light or otherwise unsuitable for the
manufacture of good bows. Substitutes have long been sought.
An all-steel bow stick was tried in the mid-19th century, and,
more recently, composite fiber bows have been produced to
passable reviews, though they have yet to rival pernambuco in
quality or popularity. Pernambuco’s unreliability also made it
expensive: one 19th-century expert maintained that one could
go through eight to ten tons of pau-brasil to find the wood for
a single, fine, 70- to 80-gram bow. Though that ratio has been
improved dramatically by modern techniques, there still remains
a lot of waste. Only a portion of even the best trees are
suitable for fine bows, and woodcutters in the forests, unheedful
of conservation and unschooled in craftspeople’s
needs, have been known to fell tree after tree before finding
one containing usable wood.
fortunately for bow makers of Tourte’s time, the
wood was readily available in Europe whenever a war wasn’t
disrupting maritime commerce. Its importation was owed to
a red pigment that suffuses its grain (“pau-brasil” means “furnace-
red wood” in Portuguese), which was extracted for dyeing
the robes of nobility. The dye trade made pernambuco the
main export from the Portuguese colony of Brazil in its early
years, a distinction memorialized in nomenclature. Pau-brasil
was not named after the colony; Brazil was named after the
wood. In Tourte’s time, 168 acres of central Paris were piled
head-high with pau-brasil logs.
The trade in the wood collapsed after the invention of
aniline dyes in the mid-1800s, leaving bow making the only
international industry still reliant on the pau-brasil tree.
That reliance was small compared with the volumes of wood
that had been needed to produce dyes, but it was big enough
to confer an inescapable responsibility on bow makers. Even
if they used relatively little wood, the wood they were using
was rapidly disappearing.
“It’s like the Georges Bank fishing grounds,” says Espey.
“Georges Bank has been fished out by industry for hundreds
of years. But if grandpa takes grandson and some fishing
poles down some weekend and catches the very last scrod,
who exterminated the species? Grandpa did.”
Contemporary bow makers are determined not to become
villains in a similar extinction drama. Soon after IPCI
began deliberating over a response to the pernambuco crisis,
its members turned their attention to more basic matters
than the effect of a CITES listing on their careers. They
began worrying about the fate of the tree itself.
pau-brasil grows in a particular Brazilian habitat known as
the Mata Atlantica, the forests of the coastal plain. Those
forests were once lush, with dozens of species of trees, and
seemingly endless, stretching uninterrupted southward from
the mouth of the Amazon to the Argentine border. Today the
forests exist only in tiny isolated fragments. They were plundered
in the 16th century to supply world markets with woods
like mahogany and pernambuco, and portions were leveled
for sugar cane plantations, but the destruction has vastly accelerated
since World War II with the building of highways
and the intensification of development. The trees are burned
for charcoal to supply the country’s steel mills, and cut down
by farmers clearing fields for beans and by big farming conglomerates
creating pastures for beef cattle. In the states of
Espírito Santo and southern Bahia, square mile after square
mile of forest has been replaced with regimental rows of fastgrowing
eucalyptus to feed a giant pulp mill at Aracruz.
The more intrepid of the world’s 200 bow makers have
long paid visits to the Mata Atlantica, with a single purpose:
shopping. The quest for wood often brought them to
Guarana, the home of the late Horst John, a German expatriate
wood dealer who founded his own bow-manufacturing
company in 1976, the first such in Brazil. The visitors arrived
from the United States or Europe with a camera and a
bathing suit, but left, more often than not, with a suitcase
full of sticks. “There’s a saying in the trade,” says Yung Chin,
48, a bow maker who has a shop near Manhattan’s Carnegie
Hall: “ ‘Abow maker never vacations in Brazil.’ ”
They still are not vacationing there, but they are coming
more frequently, and with a grander mission. Slowly, IPCI is
building a hard-fought success on the ground. The group
began, in 2001, by digging wells and installing irrigation systems
to help save 100,000 pernambuco seedlings threatened
by drought in a Recife nursery, and inviting such authorities
as Haroldo Calvacante de Lima, director of the Rio de
Janeiro Botanical Garden, to Paris to consult with IPCI on
growing pau-brasil. The trees’ needs are little understood.
Despite pernambuco’s status as Brazil’s official national tree,
and despite its long commercial history, its growing habits
and preferred habitats are still mysterious. There is not even
a scientific consensus on how many varieties and species of
pau-brasil exist.
To fill this knowledge gap, IPCI sought out the cacao
farmer’s research concern and began to shape with it a program
that includes population inventories and taxonomic
studies. If all goes as planned, the studies, paid for by contributions
from bow makers around the world, will culminate
in the replanting of pau-brasil in the cacao habitats of
Bahia state. Cacao, the source of chocolate, is a shade-loving
plant; by coupling a pernambuco overstory with the welfare
of the cacao crop beneath it, the cacao research center’s
botanists hope to provide farmers with an economic incentive
for keeping the trees standing during the 30 years or so
needed to produce usable wood.
A quarter-century ago, wood dealer and bow maker Horst
John recognized the need to replenish the dwindling stock
of trees and began planting pernambuco on his property in
Guarana. His effort has been expanded by Jacy Sousa, who
has headed Horst John Bows since the founder’s death in
November 1997, and is being replicated by Arcos Brazil and
Waterviolet Bows, also in the Guarana area, and by Marco
Raposo Bows farther south in Domingos Martins. Floriano
Schaefer, who runs Arcos Brazil with Celso de Mello, has
worked to salvage and use nonliving sources of pernambuco,
such as dead logs lying on the forest floor.
Those same bow makers have been spearheading IPCI’s
efforts with the government, which require a native’s understanding
of the Byzantine world of Brazilian law and politics,
a territory less charted and fraught with greater peril than
the country’s snake-infested forests. Federal and state laws
already forbid the cutting of pernambuco under most circumstances,
and the transportation or use of most of the
wood. As a result, Brazilian bow companies have come under
close inspection by the national ecological policing agency,
which wants assurances that the companies’ wood stocks
(and some of the wood they’ve sold to foreign bow makers)
do not come from illegal sources. As the Brazilian makers
labor to demonstrate that their suppliers are reputable, the
IPCI bow makers must allay other suspicions. Brazilians have
a fear, grounded in the hard lessons of their history, of the intentions
of outsiders, who have traditionally come to extract
the nation’s natural riches but not to help the country. IPCI
bow makers have had to ensure that they are not merely putting
an idealistic face on the same exploitation that supplied
wood to their professional forebears for 200 years.
To that end, the contract that IPCI signed with the cacao
research center in November 2003 goes far beyond simply
ensuring the future of the tree. It offers environmental education
and economic support for poor and landless farmers.
Thanks partly to the involvement of the German Association
for Technical Cooperation, an agency dedicated to
conservation and development issues, the contract is also
integrated with efforts to establish bio corridors—extended
and uninterrupted ecosystems—critical to  the survival of
many species of the once-universal, now fragmented Mata
Atlantica. “This is big,” Yung Chin observed on a tropical
Bahian summer evening last November, after he, Klaus
Grünke, Marco Ciambelli, Charles Espey and Marco Raposo
had hashed out the final details of the accord with the
cacao research center. “Three years ago I thought we were
just going to go to Brazil and dig a hole in the forest and
throw some money in. Boy, was I wrong. We’re part of something
that’s bigger than we ever imagined.”
The profound interconnection between a musical tool, a
plant, an ecology, an economy, and a society and its history
is a lesson of the forest. On the June day in 2002 when the
visiting bow makers walked into the Mata Atlantica to find
the old pau-brasil tree, José Roberto de Melo explained the
significance of the plants they beheld: how this vine was sacred
in the African religions transplanted to Brazil by the
slave trade, how another had medicinal use. One of the cooperative’s
workers cut a large leaf from a palmetto and held
it up with a smile. “This is an instrument too,” he said, one
that the aboriginal Indians had used to communicate over
long distances. He hit the end of the stalk with the shank of
his machete, and a loud, hollow bass note boomed through
the forest. “Warning,” he translated. The IPCI bow makers
are sounding a similar alarm: the future of a high art rests on
the future of an imperiled tree.
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