Nach Meyer 8-Key, F

A sweet flute at moderate to moderate-quiet volume, and pitched right at A=440, which is genuinely uncommon in an antique of this type and makes it usable straight away rather than a curiosity.

Recently gone through: the pads have been replaced with foam to seal better, a hairline crack in the barrel has been sealed, and the tenons have fresh cork. Higher F is a pitch you rarely see in these, which is part of what makes it a fun piece.

"Nach Meyer" is not a maker's name but a model designation, German for "after Meyer." Heinrich Friedrich Meyer of Hanover built flutes from 1848 into the early 1900s and earned an international reputation for instruments of unusually mellow tone and easy speech. His design was copied widely by German workshops, who stamped their versions "nach Meyer" and sold them at a fraction of the price of a genuine Meyer. They were most popular between roughly 1880 and 1920, when they became the most widely imported flute model in the United States. Quality varies considerably from one to the next, so each has to be judged on its own merits; the Library of Congress notes that the best of them were as good as or better than genuine Meyer instruments.