I was driving in the car with my wife the other day, and suddenly the name “Foky Gurber” (didn’t know how to spell it then) popped into my head out of nowhere.
I turned to her and said “WHO is Foky Gruber?!” She just gave me a strange look…I guess she thought it was a rhetorical question.
For the past couple of days I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out who or what Foky Gruber was/is, and why it was stuck in my mind. For those of you familiar with the term, I was wondering if I’d picked up some kind of Foky Gruber ‘meme’ while conversing with some of my more unsavory aquaintances.
Anyway, after a few Web searches I discovered that he’s a recorder (and maybe whistle) maker, and was then quickly able to trace it back to an entry on the High End Whistle page on Chiff&Fipple:
Silberton whistles by Foky Gruber
From what I read on the other Web sites on Foky, I don’t think the Silberton is a whistle. Here’s a snippet:
Gruber developed the “Silberton”, an all-metal soprano recorder made entirely of nickel-plated brass, and an alto made of rosewood with a metal head-joint and two keys for the lowermost finger hole. Both feature a sytem of adjustable voicing achieved by altering the position of the block and the height of the windway. Both were of cylindrical bore. Later the German firm Hopf produced “Silberton” instruments which they now offer as “Gruber System” recorders by Kobliczek in sopranino, soprano, and alto models. Today, Gruber is making them again by himself as signed handmade recorders in small series, also in pure silver.
-Brett 
