Ocarina
It does WHAT?
It may be hard for some people to understand, but ocarinas have changed my life.
Ocarinas are musical instruments, made of ceramic, or plastic, or sometimes wood. Ocarinas have been made, and played, for more than 4,500 years. They originated in Central America, where they are played to this day.
Ocarinas come in three general styles: transverse, where the finger holes are left to right (like the ones above); inline, where the mouthpiece is parallel with the main body of the ocarina, such that a players breath is blown along the length of the instrument, such as below:-
and the English style pendant ocarinas, where the holes are arranged in a square, requiring a special kind of fingering sequence to reach the notes.
Ocarinas come in all shapes and sizes. Here’s one of the smallest ocarinas I have ever seen.
This instrument is literally used to mimic birdsong.
This is one of my favourite ocarina music videos, a very popular Youtube file.
Misty Mountains Cold, STL Ocarina
Why Ocarinas?
I think I’ve always had music close to me. From the time I bought my first Walkman, through to my Sony Diskman, to carrying files in an old MP3 player, and eventually my mobile phone, I’ve never been far from having music surrounding me.
It took a tiny shift in my worldview from becoming a consumer of other people’s music to playing my own tunes.
Lockdowns
Okay, this post’s going to be here a while, I hope, so this is going to sound increasingly distant, some dry and dusty forgotten corner of history.
2020 was the year that a virus, covid-19, swept the globe. Most of the planet went into lockdown. That virus was nasty.
There wasn’t a hell of a lot that we could do during lockdown, and while the world was going stir crazy, I suddenly had the idea that maybe I could learn to play a musical instrument. Of all the musical instruments I could choose, I felt that ocarinas were the way to go. So I ordered my first one.
I didn’t stop at one.
Once you buy your first ocarina, nobody stops at one.
It never stops at one.
Tuneful Hobby
I guess there’s a lesson in this post somewhere. I’m sure that, given an incentive, someone could dig it out of the data.
I’m just posting it because I love talking about this hobby, and about ocarinas. There’s a sense of connection to the past, when you’re playing one of these. The more you play it, the easier it gets to play, the more confidence you get, and the better it sounds.
Also, there are no painful memories of music teachers lurking over your shoulder to criticise you if you score B flat instead of B. Ocarinas tend to be overlooked in school music curricula: the main woodwind musical instruments of choice tend to be flutes and, in Wales at least, recorders. Many ocarina players come to this hobby after playing a video game, the classic Ocarina of Time, so many ocarina owners tend to be motivated to learn how to play their instruments to create the great songs from that video game.
Me, I just want to play like some woodland creature found sitting on a tree stump somewhere, whose only job is to point passing adventurers in the direction of the wizard’s tower.
Turn around. It’s back that way.