A few weeks ago my John Terry cello, the instrument I played on from 2009-2020, arrived at Claire Givens Violins in Minneapolis. I had original consigned it to be sold at a shop in Boston, but the market there is highly competitive and after nearly two years on the floor without significant interest, a change of place seemed to be a good idea.

Selling a cello is something I have done through consignment before and it takes time in the best market, so with the depression in the demand due to covid and the glut of amazing cellos for sale, it has not been surprising that it hasn’t yet sold. My previous cello took nearly three years to sell, for example, and that was in a rebounding market after the recession of 2008.

A complicating factor in having my cello consigned where it was in Boston was that they had another cello by the same maker consigned just a few weeks before mine, which meant that the pricing of my cello was tied to the pricing of the other. If I had wanted to reduce the price, it may have confused the market to see two Terry cellos with differing prices even though the cellos themselves were very different in material, model and sound and differed in age by about 25 years.

And so I made the decision to contact Claire Givens Violins in Minneapolis to see if they would accept my John Terry cello into their inventory. They were aware of John Terry and spoke favorably about his work, thinking it may be a good fit for the shop. John Terry was an English maker, who was living in Florence, Italy. He attended violin making school in Cremona, as did Michele Ashley, the maker of my current cello. Andrew Dipper, who does restoration at Claire Givens was an instructor in Cremona many years ago and perhaps they even crossed paths with eachother. One rather odd connection to Madison is that Ralph Rabin, my friend and a(the) local Madison instrument dealer, rented out John Terry’s Cremona apartment after he left the city. Ralph was also friends with Michele while in Cremona. Lot’s of connections…In any case, John Terry’s cellos are very well regarded apparently and I think Claire had some prior experience with trying to acquire one of his instruments before his death from brain cancer in 2010.

Unfortunately, my cello arrived in Minneapolis with a loose neck, meaning it may have taken a bump during shipping. Additionally, the neck reset that I thought was done in Boston turns out not to have been done. Instead the shop decided that replacing the fingerboard and cutting a higher bridge was a safer option for dealing with the low projection. I was quite annoyed when I heard from Claire Givens that the reset had never been completed. Furthermore a neck reset is still necessary to fix the projection issue in their opinion. It felt like a big setback since a neck reset is what was originally planned for the cello when I first consigned it in 2020. I imagined that it was sitting on the floor in subpar condition for two years. I get that some complicated decisions had to be made about what was best for the cello, but I needed to be consulted, and I wasn’t.

So the cello will be having major surgery with the neck reset and then the pegs will be replaced, a new endpin installed, a new bridge cut, and a new sound post installed. After that, it will need an adjustment and hopefully it will be played in a fair bit so that it’s ready to vibrate for whoever might come into the shop in search of cello.

I still have not seen the Terry cello since I shipped it to Boston in late 2020. I will likely take a day trip up to Minneapolis to play it a bit and give my thoughts on the setup when the time comes. I’m looking forward to that day.