Posted by Klaus on April 11, 2002 at 00:50:37:
In Reply to: Re: "Walter E. Sear, New York, N.Y." Tuba posted by David on April 10, 2002 at 19:41:34:
"Those horns were closer to a Mirafone copy of the same time"
But for maybe some minor tech details, Cerveny does not copy Miraphone.
It is the other way round. Most German rotary low brass designs can be traced back to Cerveny.
Which is not very odd, as major German makers like Meinl Weston and Miraphone started out with craftsmen that were post-WWII refugees out of the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia, which was where Cerveny was, and still is, made.
That Cerveny made a lot of stencil instruments had to do with their low prices. Which came from lower labour costs. And from the general tendency of the then communist countries to dump prices on whatever goods they could sell to the Western countries with their attractive currencies.
I do not know of the craftsmen tradition in Czechoslovakia. But in Germany, East and West alike, there were/is very rigid rules and tests for the education of apprentices through masters. That might count for the fact, that German instruments are considered better made than the Czech ones.
The late John Petersen of I. K. Gottfried in Copenhagen, my repairman through almost 30 years, once told me, that the B&S/Hoyer/Scherzer instruments, that I could buy of the shelf in Denmark, would not have been available to me, if I had lived in GDR, where these instruments were made.
Only the members of the best of GDR's about 90 professional orchestras (for a population of about 16 millions), had access to the best domestic instruments. These were made to generate currency.
And they were in rather short supply, because even in GDR, too few young people were ready to go through the rigorous 12 years of training demanded to qualify as a master.
Klaus