FUTURE PROOF

Natural hardwoods, including ebony and rosewood, are becoming increasingly rare

GETTY/THICHA STUDIO

Hardwood alternatives are no longer confined to just a few expensive niche products, but are now rapidly entering the mainstream market at every price point and for every type of fitting, as Peter Somerford discovers

As the tropical hardwoods used in traditional violin and bow making have been depleted and, in some cases, become subject to international trade regulations, innovators have developed alternatives that seek to serve different market sectors. Carbon fibre is long established as the non-wood alternative to pernambuco for bows, with companies offering models for young students through to advanced and professional-level players. The comparatively recent development of man-made alternatives to ebony for fingerboards and other fittings is accelerating with the emergence of high-tech manufacturing processes and new applications for existing industrial materials. While densified and engineered wood products are being taken up by smaller workshops and individual makers, less expensive ebony alternatives such as compressed recycled paper products may become an option for violin companies with larger production scales, where the cost of materials is a bigger factor.

Awareness of the different ebony alternatives available, but also the ecological reasons for choosing them, is key to wider adoption. Most of the ebony woods in use today come from the Diospyros genus, which covers around 700 species. Of these, 40 are critically endangered according to the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) Red List, 105 are listed as endangered and 92 as vulnerable. In 2013 CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) added 135 species of Madagascan ebony and rosewood to its Appendix II list, which CITES defines as including ‘species not necessarily threatened with extinction, but in which trade must be controlled in order to avoid utilisation incompatible with their survival’. More widely, logging practices in which numerous trees were cut down in the search for the few that yield the coveted black heartwood have led to biodiversity losses in some ebony forests. Centuries of over-exploitation have exhausted prime-quality ebony stocks to the point that the overall quality of ebony available today, particularly in the quantities needed for cello and bass fingerboards, is poorer than it used to be.

The International Alliance of Violin and Bow Makers for Endangered Species (alliance-international.org) has begun working with violin making schools in Mirecourt, Parma, Cremona, Chicago and Quebec City to introduce students to ebony alternatives by sending the schools samples of different fingerboard materials along with information about their physical characteristics. Kathy Reilly, president of the Alliance’s education committee, is co-owner of Vermont Violins, whose V. Richelieu line of instruments uses two quite different sustainable fingerboard alternatives – Sonowood and GaiaTone. Sonowood, from Swiss Wood Solutions, takes sustainably sourced maple, beech or spruce and densifies it to surpass ebony for density, hardness and sound velocity. GaiaTone, by contrast, is made from 95 per cent postconsumer recycled compressed paper and 5 per cent bio resin. This makes it particularly suitable for cellos and basses, says Reilly, for which Sonowood is relatively expensive and its black beech variant Sonowood Black is not yet available. ‘The beauty of recycled paper products is that they’re much cheaper than the engineered wood alternatives,’ she says. ‘And the way you cut or mill them is less expensive, because instead of doing one or two pieces at a time, you can do 40 or 50 in a run. That brings your processing costs down, and your material costs are less to start with. If we want to make a big shift in the ebony alternatives market, getting these recycled, post-consumer compressed paper products into the hands of the large-scale violin companies is going to make a huge difference.’

An example of a V. Richelieu viola, which makes use of sustainable alternatives materials for the fingerboard

CENTURIES OF EXPLOITATION HAVE E XHAUSTED STOCKS TO THE POINT THAT THE OVERALL QUALIT Y OF EBONY AVAILABLE TODAY IS POORER THAN IT USED TO BE

A fingerboard made from GaiaTone

One challenge with GaiaTone compared with a woodbased product like Sonowood is tooling. ‘GaiaTone doesn’t work well with regular block planes, and is more suited to sanding or commercial files,’ says Reilly. ‘One of our big hurdles in the past year has been developing a block-plane blade that can work with this material, but we’ve now got a blade that can be retrofitted to the block planes that makers are already using.’

For high-end instruments however, GaiaTone falls short of Sonowood in sonic performance according to Boris Haug, a maker at Swiss firm Wilhelm Geigenbau, which produces a complete range of fittings in ebony alternative materials. ‘The sound velocity of the paper product is 3,500m/s, which is even slower than Indian ebony, a short-fibre ebony, so as an alternative material it’s comparatively quite soft,’ says Haug. ‘You can always make the fingerboard thicker to compensate, so it becomes stiffer, but then you compromise the aesthetics, and you’re also putting more mass on the instrument.’

Alongside Sonowood, Haug is a proponent of Ebonprex, an industrial material made of thin layers of beech held together

As most ebony is not pure black, it is unsuitable for use in the music industry

with a resin glue. ‘Because the fibres in Ebonprex are all parallel, when you cut it and work with it, it feels the same as wood,’ says Haug. Ebonprex’s stiffness and damping characteristics are similar to ebony, but Haug says the price is considerably lower than Sonowood, a material that requires a more high-tech production process. ‘When you use materials that are a near match for ebony in physical characteristics, you don’t have to reconfigure the balance of the instrument to a new set of material parameters when swapping out the fingerboard,’ he adds. ‘We can even make the fingerboards more how they were 50 or 100 years ago. Nowadays you see very thick ebony fingerboards because of the poor quality of the ebony. With an excellent alternative material you don’t need such a thick fingerboard. A thinner one looks more elegant.’

Ebonprex can be used to make fittings such as fingerboards and pegs

EBONY PHOTO THICHA STUDIO/GETTY

It’s also about waste, Reilly says. ‘It’s now very hard to find good-quality ebony. A new statistic I saw about ebony logs coming out of Nigeria is that only 3–7 per cent are suitable for the music industry. Because what you’re looking for is clean, black wood, and that’s not what the bulk of ebony trees are like. The question is what happens to the rest of that wood.’

For Reilly, paper-based products such as GaiaTone arguably offer a safer, more sustainable alternative in the long term than either Sonowood or Ebonprex, especially if the focus is on cost and mass production. ‘Sonowood and Ebonprex are both certified as sustainable products,’ she says, ‘but with climate change there is a concern that even European common beech might struggle in the next 30 to 60 years. Should we be relying on a single tree species where it’s necessary to take thick pieces of wood and compress them to obtain the characteristics of ebony?’ Reilly also notes that the bio resin in GaiaTone is biodegradable, as opposed to the synthetic, phenolic resins in some of the engineered wood products, which potentially introduce new environmental problems. ‘We shouldn’t just be developing alternatives,’ she says. ‘We should be finding sustainable alternatives.’

Other man-made ebony alternatives for fingerboards include Néo-Ebène’s Corene, an ‘eco-composite’ of paper fibres with a phenol-formaldehyde resin binder; Flaxwood, a wood fibre composite; Sound Composites Arcotech, which comprises a carbon fibre core, a graphite tooling layer and a maple shim for gluing; and Dark Paper from German fittings company Berdani, a composite of recycled paper and resin. The applications for ebony alternatives go beyond fingerboards to encompass tailpieces, chin rests, pegs and end-buttons, as well as bow frogs. German-based Paulus Bowparts, for example, offers frogs in a proprietary composite called Sucseno, and CodaBow uses Xebony, a composite of organic fibres and resin, for the frogs of its carbon fibre bows.

One of the newest ebony alternatives to come on to the market is Obsidian Ebony from ThermalWood Canada, a company that specialises in thermally modifiying native hardwoods. ‘Our base for Obsidian is maple, which we thermally modify to give it increased stability,’ says the company’s CEO Bob Lennon. ‘At the same time, thermal modification changes the wood’s molecular structure in a way that allows us to infuse resins even more easily into the wood. After thermally modifying the wood, we place it in a pressure vessel, suck all the air out, and under pressure we infuse resins and dyes into it. Then we cure it under heat, so that afterwards everything is inert.’ As with some other products that use synthetic resins, Lennon acknowledges that there can be a slight smell when working with Obsidian – he describes it as a ‘fibreglass-type smell’ – but says that most customers have no issue with this. With the guitar industry already taking an interest in the product for fingerboards, Lennon started investigating the bowed stringed instrument market in late 2023. ‘We’re not producing large volumes yet,’ says Lennon, ‘but once the interest and volume increases, we’ll able to bring our pricing down, although most people I’ve approached already seem happy with the price.’

Pegs made from Dark Paper

A CodaBow Marquise cello frog, made from Xebony composite

BOW MAKERS HAVE TRIED SNAKEWOOD, GIRAFFE THORN ACACIA AND KATALOX, BUT THE MOST SUSTAINABLE NATURAL MATERIAL INVESTIGATED SO FAR IS BAMBOO

With pernambuco, although established bow makers in the US and Europe may have still have personal stocks to last them another 20 or 30 years, bow making students and new makers face an uncertain future. The Brazilian government was unsuccessful with a 2022 proposal to CITES to raise pernambuco from Appendix II to the highestlevel Appendix I listing, an outcome which would have made international trade virtually impossible and international travel highly restricted. However, if illegal logging in Brazil’s Mata Atlântica rainforest continues, and illicit trade is not stamped out through effective enforcement, calls may grow for stronger international regulation. Despite the efforts of the bow makerled IPCI (International Pernambuco Conservation Initiative) and partner organisations in Brazil over the past two decades to support sustainable pernambuco forestry with replanting schemes and other conservation projects, the bow making industry is now coming under pressure to work with national authorities to register pernambuco stockpiles and develop a traceability system for bows, possibly using some kind of unique identification code for every pernambuco bow.

As regards alternative woods for bows, ipê has been used as a pernambuco substitute, but is at risk of over-exploitation because of its popularity as a decking material and was added to the CITES Appendix II list in 2022. Bow makers have also experimented with snakewood, giraffe thorn acacia and katalox, but potentially the most sustainable natural material investigated so far is bamboo, which can be found in laminated form in the patented NuBow from bow maker Rodney Mohr.

NuBow uses sustainable laminated bamboo

'I AM CONFIDENT THAT WHEN EUROPE AN AND US MAKERS START USING ALTERNATIVES, CHINESE MAKERS WILL FOLLOW' –

For players looking to future-proof their next bow purchase in anticipation of possible harsher restrictions on travel and trade, carbon fibre bows are an attractive option. Established carbon fibre bow making companies have responded to the question marks over pernambuco’s future by ensuring they have model lines to cater for different levels of player, and by refining the sound and handling qualities of their highest grade bows to compete with the finest wooden bows beloved by soloists and other professionals. Bernd Müsing, the founder of the German-based Arcus and Müsing bow brands, says: ‘We have doubled our workforce and doubled our output over the last five years. And we want to double our output again over the next two years, across both Arcus and Müsing. It’s not easy to increase the production of Arcus bows because making them is very labour-intensive and difficult, but we are making substantial investments because I see a huge demand coming towards us.’

Having founded Arcus 25 years ago, Müsing launched the Müsing brand after 2007, when pernambuco was added to the CITES Appendix II list, necessitating permits for the export of wood and bow blanks, although finished bows were exempt. ‘I realised that some day a serious problem will hit pernambuco,’ says Müsing. ‘That meant we had to find a less complex way of making quality bows than the

A Müsing carbon fibre violin bow way we manufacture the Arcus bows. The technology we developed to make the Müsing sticks will allow us to make three or four times as many bows in the future. And while Müsing bows don't offer quite the same performance as the Arcus bows, with their walls being not quite as thin, they are still matching pernambuco bows twice their price. We also designed them to be less demanding in playability and sound production, so in the price range of about €1,000 they should provide a good solution for many advancing players.’

CodaBow Marquise bass bows with

Xebony frogs

CodaBow, the Minnesota-based company that traces its origins back to 1956, is also looking to a future of rising demand for carbon fibre bows. ‘Our aim has always been to ensure we have a bow in our product line for everyone, no matter their skill level or style,’ says the company’s sales operations manager, Mary Peterson. ‘Even though restrictions aren’t universally in place now, and potentially won’t be for a long time, I think awareness is growing, and sustainability is becoming more important. Leaning into that will be important for us.’ CodaBow’s general manager Kai Maurud adds: ‘We are in a good position because we are able to scale up production; it’s just a matter of adding labour. So as the demand rises, we will rise to meet it. We are also looking at what we can do with automation and building more efficiency into our manufacturing processes to reduce production costs.’ CodaBow’s top-line model is currently the Marquise, but the company has ambitions to develop a bow that surpasses it. ‘Our products do a good job of catering to 85 per cent of musicians now,’ says Peterson. ‘The next level for us will be going beyond the Marquise and competing with those high-end wooden bows that sell for around the $50,000 level.’

For players who prefer a new pernambuco bow over a carbon fibre one, they could still opt for a sustainable ebony alternative such as Sonowood for the frog. Musicians becoming more aware of ebony alternatives could start to shift the market, but among makers there are still those who already have ample supplies of ebony in their workshop, or others who are attracted to cheap, available sources of ebony. Boris Haug is optimistic, however. ‘Once the better shops and the better makers offer players an alternative,’ he says, ‘other makers will look to what the best in the field are doing and start emulating them. I’m also confident that when European and US makers start using alternatives, Chinese makers will follow. They will come up with their own alternatives.’

Reilly suggests that we look too to the sensitivities and determining power of audiences. ‘When we talk about ebony alternatives, or pernambuco alternatives, we focus on the musicians, the makers, the suppliers,’ she says. ‘We rarely ask what audiences think, even though they pay all of our bills ultimately. What if the audience does not think an instrument made out of endangered species sounds different enough for them to support that player or orchestra? Or the audience just doesn’t believe we should use threatened or endangered species? Maybe the communities we perform for will make the decision for us.’