— Transporting a 100-piece orchestra and all of its instruments, wardrobe and other cargo items from Chicago to five European cities was already complicated before the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service got involved.
Turns out that endangered-species protection and classical music have found their intersection point, as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (and other traveling musicians) now must document each and every piece of restricted flora and fauna present in their instruments and accessories, some of which are more than a century old.
The change stems from the Obama administration’s move to protect African elephants from ivory poaching by enforcing the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which entered into force in 1975.
A Feb. 25 Fish & Wildlife Service order, which has been tweaked a bit since then, doesn’t allow instruments that contain ivory or other banned substances to be transported back into the U.S. unless the forbidden materials were present before Feb. 26, 1976, and the instrument hasn’t been bought since the order was issued. The CSO — which arrived Wednesday in Geneva after performances in Warsaw and Luxembourg, with Paris and Vienna still to come — is on its first international tour since these rules took effect. CSO director of operations Heidi Lukas said she and members of her staff spent much of the summer and early fall reaching out to musicians so they could document the materials, manufacture dates and purchase dates of all potentially questionable items leaving the country.
“For example, we have bows that contain African elephant ivory,” Lukas said. “We have a couple of bassoons that have an ivory ring in them. We’re carrying Brazilian rosewood in a few instruments, the xylophone, things like that.”
Also on the endangered list: tortoise shell, whalebone and monitor lizard, the latter of which is present in some cello bows. Most common is the ivory on old violin bow tips.
“We have to declare we know that, for example, this ivory was harvested before this law went into effect, which isn’t that hard to prove for most instruments because some of these bows are quite old,” Lukas said.
Getting this approval, which involved meeting with a U.S. Fish & Wildlife inspector at O’Hare International Airport, came in addition to preparing a carnet, described by Lukas as “our huge customs document that lists everything that’s in our cargo right down to the very last bow and lists all the information about serial numbers, years of manufacture, value — which is a really long and difficult document to do in itself, because we also have to sort out who’s putting what in the cargo versus who’s hand-carrying (items) on the plane.”
She credited the League of American Orchestras with helping the CSO navigate the tricky waters to obtain its traveling exhibition certificate, which remains valid until 2017. “But it only covers the instruments that we are covering this time,” Lukas said, “so if there are other instruments that are going in a future tour, we may have to do another one to cover those.”
Plus, customs agents on the tour can ask to inspect the cargo, so the CSO hired photographer Todd Rosenberg “to take really quality photos of all these items,” Lukas said, “because, of course, we’d rather have them look at the photos than be unpacking everything.”
Also, individual musicians carrying instruments must go through this process on their own. The requirements have prompted some musicians to take steps to avoid the matter completely.
“This is an example of unanticipated consequences,” said Vanessa Moss, the CSO’s vice president for orchestra and building operations. “There are many who are substituting synthetic or non-endangered pieces to avoid all of this. ‘Should we take the pegs out of one of the violins the CSO owns and substitute different pegs?’ The pegs might be ivory or rosewood or something.”
Assistant concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu said she collected all of the necessary documents for her violin and bow and also “packed my bow in one of my colleagues’ shipped instruments trunk, because I can’t risk hand-carrying it. I then borrowed a carbon fiber bow to practice on the days when we don’t have access to our trunks. We were told that we risk having our bows confiscated if we hand-carried.”
She added that she hopes those enforcing the regulations are well trained so they’re not “putting our valuable instruments in danger in the end.”
So far, everything on this tour has passed inspection, knock wood, Lukas said — but then again, the law applies to bringing the items into the U.S. “They’ll be making sure we have all of the required documentation as we come back in as well,” she said.
Meanwhile, the cargo made its tightest connection of the two-and-a-half-week tour when it traveled by truck from Warsaw, where the orchestra performed Monday night, to Luxembourg, where it performed Tuesday. It was a 16-hour drive, with the two trucks loaded and hitting the road from Warsaw around midnight, and because of the drivers’ required breaks, each truck had two drivers working in shifts.
“It wasn’t ideal,” Lukas said. “Normally we would plan more time, but it worked out well because (the Luxembourg hall) had another orchestra rehearsal that went until 4:30 anyway. For an 8 o’clock concert we normally load in at 3, and we didn’t load in till 5, which is really late for us.”
Yet at least Luxembourg’s modern Philharmonie is “a logistical dream” with its easy access and ample storage space, Lukas said. Warsaw’s backstage area was so small that the wardrobe trunks had to be stored in the hotel, and the same is true in Geneva.
Not that anyone is complaining. Moss said that on a mid-1980s CSO tour the cargo didn’t get from Arizona to San Francisco in time for a concert, so the orchestra had to borrow instruments from the San Francisco Symphony and its Youth Orchestra, as well as music dealers. “We had stuff literally out on a table,” she said.
For continuing coverage of the CSO’s Europe tour, go to chicagotribune.com/cso-europe.
Twitter @MarkCaro
