Subject: RE: Who will stand up: Feds Raid Gibson Guitar Fac
From:
GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 22 Sep 11 - 04:58 AM
These articles only concern ivory - however - rosewood, tortise shell and hundreds of other items are banned
Excert FROM - webpage - peabody.jhu.edu/3572
TOOLS OF THE TRADE - The Piano That Purred (John Hopkins University)
It's a grim decision no musician should ever have to face: If you want to keep playing a beloved instrument, it will have to suffer an irreparable change. For Jeffrey Sharkey, director of Peabody Institute, that decision came in 1989, and it involved his beloved ivory-keyed Steinway S grand piano, which he had played since age 12.
After graduate school, he made plans to move to England to be with his now-wife Alison Wells, a member of Peabody's cello faculty.
"I wanted to bring my piano over," he says. "I had one year to do it without paying an import tax because of my visa's window with Her Majesty's custom and excise regulations—but the U.N. had imposed a ban on importing ivory." And there were no exceptions, even for the Steinway's documented and legal 1940s-era ivory.
"Customs had the right to confiscate the piano if they wanted to," he says.
He couldn't take that risk. "So I had the piano shipped to Steinway, and they put on plastic keys. The 88 ivory keys are now in my dad's house," he says, all smashed and rendered unusable during the difficult removal process.
NOT a BELIEVER Yet?
You should ALSO read this article about the "Convention on International Trade In Endangered Species" and traveling with contraband instrument parts.
bluegrasswales.org/CITES.htm
OR - How About?
Apr 20, 2011 ... Pianos bearing ivory keys arriving without a certificate are confiscated or impounded. If confiscated, your piano may be lost to you permanently. ...
squarepianotech.com/?page_id=320
OR .....Spring 2011 ....The owner of an Atlanta piano import/export company was sentenced in March for illegally smuggling internationally protected elephant ivory into the U.S. Fish and Game officers raided the company after being tipped off by the CITES Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland
awionline.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/40261/pid/40234
OR
CITES, and by definition Lacey, applies to new and old instruments alike, and have no “di minimus” requirement, so an instrument crafted entirely out of endangered woods, or one with a single ivory fret dot, are both in violation and subject to confiscation.
....But the risk remains that instruments could be confiscated, and business people could be hit with fines of up to $10,000 per instrument for “knowingly possessing” a noncompliant instrument. In effect, the amendment makes those in the music industry like drug dealers....
http://www.harmonycentral.com/docs/DOC-2046?decorator=print
OR
Krystian Zimerman, the great Polish concert pianist's piano was confiscated by customs officials at New York's JFK airport, who thought the glue smelled funny. They subsequently destroyed the instrument.
In 2006 he tried to travel with his own piano again, only to have it held up in customs for five days and disrupt his performance schedule.
April 2009, The Guardian - guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/28/krystian-zimerman-missile-defence-poland
Sincerely,
Gargoyle
Obama's Momma has NOTHING to do with it....first they came for the accoridians and I said nothing.
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sj
