Carter?
"Yes sir?"
What is it, Carter?
"An ocarina, sir"
Bring it up here!
I've had a really nice, small "English four-hole" unglazed terracotta pendant ocarina since I was a kid. They are actually really fun to play and very visceral, in a sense; the way you can get a chromatic scale from only four hole sizes combinatorially is intellectually satisfying and weirdly easy to learn.
It came with some sheet music that shows each note as a box with four dots in it that can be shown as either open or closed:
It sounds unusually sophisticated — perhaps even better after forty-plus years -- and it's actually a relatively new design. The ocarina is ancient but the four hole chromatic design dates from the 1960s, so it's newer than those Gretsch ocarinas in the article.
You can get them in all sorts of shapes and sizes -- Thomann sell hand-painted clay 4H ocarinas in the shapes of strawberries and clownfish.
I wish we'd been taught to play these in school instead of with those Aulos descant recorders that everyone in British schools, particularly teachers I imagine, grew to hate.
show comments
jhbadger
The US military thought a lot about how to entertain its soldiers because there was a lot of downtime during a war and most of them were draftees who didn't necessarily want to be there, Another thing they did was publish pocket paperback editions of books back when paperbacks were less common.
Ocarinas have the great advantage over recorders that you can safely play them without hearing protection. I have personally measured the loud notes on both a soprano recorder and an alto recorder and the SPL meter measured over 100dB(A) at the ear (indoors, so this includes reverberation too, but most recorders are played indoors). Note that standard recorder fingering allows for almost no control over dynamics; each note has a single set volume that it must be played at to sound in tune. (Advanced technique allows slight control over dynamics with alternative fingerings.) For this reason I do not think recorders should be used in schools.
stevage
Interesting that they don't seem to have had much cultural impact. I've never heard of these, never seen them in war films. You don't hear songs wistfully using a wartime ocarina or referring to them.
show comments
brudgers
That explains the Joey's ocarina in the movie Stalag 17.
show comments
snorkel
Back in the day in elementary school we were each issued a tonette
It came with some sheet music that shows each note as a box with four dots in it that can be shown as either open or closed:
https://ocarinasongbook.com/fingering-charts/four-hole/
It sounds unusually sophisticated — perhaps even better after forty-plus years -- and it's actually a relatively new design. The ocarina is ancient but the four hole chromatic design dates from the 1960s, so it's newer than those Gretsch ocarinas in the article.
You can get them in all sorts of shapes and sizes -- Thomann sell hand-painted clay 4H ocarinas in the shapes of strawberries and clownfish.
I wish we'd been taught to play these in school instead of with those Aulos descant recorders that everyone in British schools, particularly teachers I imagine, grew to hate.
The US military thought a lot about how to entertain its soldiers because there was a lot of downtime during a war and most of them were draftees who didn't necessarily want to be there, Another thing they did was publish pocket paperback editions of books back when paperbacks were less common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Editions
Ocarinas have the great advantage over recorders that you can safely play them without hearing protection. I have personally measured the loud notes on both a soprano recorder and an alto recorder and the SPL meter measured over 100dB(A) at the ear (indoors, so this includes reverberation too, but most recorders are played indoors). Note that standard recorder fingering allows for almost no control over dynamics; each note has a single set volume that it must be played at to sound in tune. (Advanced technique allows slight control over dynamics with alternative fingerings.) For this reason I do not think recorders should be used in schools.
Interesting that they don't seem to have had much cultural impact. I've never heard of these, never seen them in war films. You don't hear songs wistfully using a wartime ocarina or referring to them.
That explains the Joey's ocarina in the movie Stalag 17.
Back in the day in elementary school we were each issued a tonette