BRAZILIAN ROSEWOOD TO BE ILLEGAL

[Alan Carruth]

The orchestra had certificates from expert appraisers saying that none of the bows had ivory on them. Customs disagreed. This is a real can of worms. On the one hand, there is a certain incentive for violin and bow dealers to falsify paperwork, but on the other I'd tend to trust a trained appraiser over an untrained Customs agent. At any rate, in this case the carriage across national boundaries had no 'commercial' purpose; the bows were not for sale, but were being used by the musicians. Until the 'instrument passport' system gets fully implemented we're probably going to see some cases like this; pretty much random stoppages of stuff. This sort of thing has been happening for some time; look up the record of stops at the Frankfurt Airport, for example.