Info sought: old German string linkage tuba, P. Edwards importer

[arpthark]

Not sure if @TheBerlinerTuba or any of you have any info on this, but...

A friend in Maine picked this up for me today. It was advertised as being from 1940. My friend got to play it and said that, aside from leaks and frozen valves, it seems to be in BBb. String linkage.

Bell says:

Made in Germany
P Edwards & Co
Sole Agent
Boston






Any info?

[arpthark]

After some preliminary digging it seems it is a turn-of-the-century Kruspe as seen here:

https://simonettitubacollection.com/ins ... -4-rotary/

[bloke]

I wonder if that Kruspe tuba is one that used to be in Memphis. There was a big tall Kaiser B-flat that belonged to a man named Nick Causey (husband of Sarah Beth Causey, who at that time was the music director of the Memphis Symphony Chorus).. He offered to sell it to me, but it was just too different from anything I was interested in and frankly it wasn't that easy to play. I think it ended up being sold to whoever was playing in the North Carolina Symphony at the time, which would have placed that instrument close enough to Tuba Exchange to end up being in the collection.

I've also wondered about those particular main tuning slide configurations. Those bows are not longer enough to make the low pitch / high pitch difference, but they probably are longer enough to make the difference between low pitch 438 and the emerging consensus pitch of 440. ( I'm sure someone will tell me that the shape of those bows has nothing to do with my conjecture.)

[arpthark]

Looking at a Kruspe catalog from 1929, it lists three B-flat tubas:

Nr. 32, Kaiserbass mit 4 Zylindern

Nr. 33, B-Bass mit 4 Zylindern

Nr. 34, B-Bass mit 3 Zylindern

The picture above in the catalog is the Kaiserbass, and it doesn't really look like the tuba I purchased, so I am guessing that the tuba in my original post is a Model 33.

bonus translation of the ad copy: "The Kruspe BBb tuba is the most perfect instrument that can be offered to the artist today. With a large, round, full, soft organlike tone and pure tuning in all registers, it is only manufactured to the highest standards. To put it in one sentence: 'A Kruspe tuba.'"