What Do You Do with a 300–Year–Old Cello When You're 75?
Nathan Waks, an Australian cellist, started a company to loan his 18th-century cello to a highly qualified student cellist.
Early this morning when I couldn’t sleep and I was watching videos about cellos and playing the cello, the YouTube algorithm delivered this video:
Nathan Waks is a well-known Australian cellist, composer, and producer who owned an 18th–century master cello currently believed to have been made in Florence in 1740–1760 by Lorenzo and Tomaso Carcassi. After playing the cello for forty years, Waks did not want to sell the cello to a collector who would lock the cello away in a vault; he wanted the cello to be played.
Waks’s solution was to become co-founder and chairman of OCTARR, a company that allows patrons to invest in collectable art and musical instruments. In effect, multiple patrons now own Waks’s cello, which is loaned to a musician for a period of time of at least two years.
The first musician to receive the cello on loan is Jung A. Kim, the winner of inaugural Classic Cello International Competition in London. Jung A. Kim is shown playing the cello in a short video. Ms. Kim also has her own YouTube channel.
The cello was evaluated and certified by Florian Leonhard, who was interviewed by OCTARR as part of OCTARR’s 18–century Cello Project:
I learned from this video that the wood in cellos and other string instruments can be dated using dendrochronology. For example, if the label in the cello states that the cello was made in 1690 but the wood is dated by dendrochronology to 1720, then the label is proven false.
OCTARR also produced three short videos about how Florian Leonhard evaluates a stringed instrument:
What to Do with My Cello?
This story of what to do with your cello when you get old caught my interest because at age 72 I am the owner of a fine, modern cello that was made by Paul Schuback in 1973. My mother played this cello until the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, when she was 88. After my mother’s death at age 91 in 2022, my brothers and I attempted unsuccessfully for three years to sell the cello on consignment through a luthier in the Pacific Northwest and then here through my local luthier here in the Boston metropolitan area. During this time, I was growing increasingly unhappy that the cello was not being used.
I decided to learn to play the cello myself, as documented in detail in this blog. I bought my brothers’ shares of the cello at the appraised value, becoming the sole owner. My plan, while learning to play the cello, is to make contacts in the cello community here in the Boston metropolitan area to find someone willing to buy it (possibly at a steep discount) or to donate the cello to a youth ensemble. My goal is to make sure the cello is being played. This plan is actually going well, but for now I expect to play the cello myself for a while since I’m enjoying learning and playing.