Posted by Rick Denney on June 14, 2003 at 09:05:57:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Who's Copying Whom? (Long) posted by who knows? on June 14, 2003 at 08:55:23:
Not me, and my unnavigable living room proves it, heh, heh. And I'm the hobbiest hobbyist of them all.
But, yes, who knows? We can speculate, though, and occasionally someone who knows something will be offended by the speculation and add something new to our store of knowledge.
Bevan included a time chart showing typical instrumentation in orchestras around the world for the last couple of hundred years. In it, he showed the ophicleide in American orchestras around the middle of the 19th Century, and the next instrument he shows is the fat contrabass in the early 20th. That has bothered me, because I've never heard of a fat contrabass before the early 1900's, nor an ophicleide after the Civil War. What was used during that gap? I think it was a small, top-action Eb tuba in the saxhorn style, because that's what we see of American instruments of that era, followed by European rotary instruments and American copies of European rotaries (as used by e.g. Helleberg and Bell).
Rick "who likes history" Denney