Pernambuco, the standard and primary material for bows of Western classical music, is a highly regulated and endangered wood. It is the deep red heartwood of brazilwood, Caesalpinia echinata. This chapter explores the significant colonial history of brazilwood, the South American nation’s namesake, and the first major commodity to be exported from the Americas to Europe, as it relates to sound aesthetics. Bringing a Brazilian studies perspective to a material considered critical for the survival of Western art music, the chapter demonstrates that the material has been highly regulated since the arrival of Europeans on the shores of Brazil in 1500; that it has been contraband and the object of piracy, intercultural and international contact and conflict, and bloodshed for just as long; that its primary use has related to elite European aesthetics for that same period; and, most significantly, that brazilwood (pau brasil in Portuguese) is a widely recognized, potent, and complex symbol of Brazilian colonial and modernist history, an emblem of the extractive relationship between the Global North and Brazil.