version 18
Last updated: January 2012
TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/italian-ocarina
Most people in the UK have no idea what an ocarina is. Of those that do, what most will think of when they hear the word is the "Langley" ocarina, a design invented by an English schoolteacher in the 1960s, which is often sold as "Celtic" or "Native American" with decorative motifs to match. It's a round or oval instrument with four fingerholes on top and sometimes two thumbholes underneath.
With misplaced ingenuity this makes the fewest holes possible do the most work. The holes vary a lot in size, and the larger ones make a difference of more than a tone to the pitch you get. So the fingering pattern is rather like the coding of binary numbers, and nothing like any other woodwind instrument. Accordingly, if you're coming to the ocarina from another woodwind or expect to play another one after learning the ocarina, this type of instrument is a mistake. It has its own repertoire (mainly music for children) but it takes an enormous amount of effort to play quickly and is next to useless as a general-purpose melodic instrument. The fingerings are so unintuitive that most players will never get past using the tablature sheets that came in the box, so their repertoire ends up comprising "Speed Bonny Boat" and "Amazing Grace", played very very slowly. Here is a distributor's demo, presumably doing their best to show what the instrument is capable of: Songstone demo.
Given about 20 years practice and 4000 years of tradition you can sound quite good playing an instrument vaguely like that with pentatonic tunes of narrow range: Chinese folk tune. You will not hear anything like that in the UK. Langley ocarinas are usually sold as children's instruments to parents who don't know any better. The American term for them, "pendant ocarinas" makes a lot more sense - they can look good as jewellery.
You may also come across real Native American ocarinas in "fair trade" shops. They are usually the same basic shape as the Langley, but have seven or eight holes allowing you to play a scale by taking fingers off successively, like a normal woodwind. The problem is that the scale you get is nothing known to Western music and no two of them seem to be tuned the same. But you can retune them with a file (to enlarge holes) and nail varnish (to reduce their diameter) and end up with a more usable instrument.
Much less common in the UK these days, but more musically useful, is the Italian type invented by Giuseppe Donati of Budrio in 1853. These are shaped like an airship, with two thumbholes underneath and eight fingerholes on top. This is one of Donati's originals:
Donati ocarina
These are modern instruments in the same tradition:
Giorgio Pacchioni ocarina in C
Wolfgang Plaschke ocarina in D
Menaglio "do-3" or "C3" ocarina
These are fingered much more like a conventional tubular woodwind instrument - as you take fingers off in a sequence from little finger to thumb, right hand then left, the pitch goes upward almost in a conventional scale (the exceptions are to help you hold it: you want a thumb underneath and a finger to balance it as much as possible).
An early idea by the Italian makers of these instruments in the 19th century was to emulate other families of instruments (like brass) and form consorts of different pitches. They tried to standardize a group of seven, all playing different pitches in C and G, like this Italian ocarina band from 1911 (picture from an EBay auction):
Budrio ocarina band, 1911
There is still a group based around the Budrio factory that continues that tradition:
But the larger sizes were always very expensive (the bass was the size of a chicken, very difficult to make), so this idea didn't catch on. But the instrument in its smaller sizes did, in many other countries around 1900. They were brought to Bavaria by Italian migrant workers and became a standard folk instrument there, and were made in Austria on a large scale. From Austria they made their way to the US, Japan, Romania and Bulgaria. Romania probably made more of them than any country outside Italy and the instrument is still played there at a professional level.
Stefan Popescu, Romania, 2005; image from eliznik.org.uk
In America, the Italian ocarina band was adapted (at least in one instance) into a version of the old military flute band dating back to colonial times:
Wherever they went, they became an instrument of the proletariat or the peasantry because they were cheap and mass produced, and they attracted the stigma that all such instruments get. At first they were only made in fired clay - still the commonest material used for good quality ocarinas - but the French firm Mathieu made them in cast pot metal in the early 20th century. Here are two of my ocarinas from that time, one in pottery made in Vienna and one in metal made in Paris, in top and bottom views:
Either, but particularly the metal one, gets me the attention of airport security x-ray staff all over Europe. But only in Italy have I been asked to demonstrate by playing a tune on it.
Here is another metal ocarina, from an EBay auction (item 3758795631). It seems to be basically the same design as my metal one but in G and with a ring for a lanyard:
One particularly attractive design was by the Meissen pottery, near Dresden in Germany. These were made of porcelain, which is a difficult material to work with the precision needed to make an accurately tuned ocarina, and the "blue onion" decoration was applied by hand painting, so they were and still are expensive:
Meissen ocarina
The sound didn't always match the appearance. Modern replicas of these (in ordinary earthenware, by Hans Rotter in Austria) are more dependably good as musical instruments.
Early American attempts at ocarina making were of mixed success. The Teschner firm in New York State made instruments similar to Italian or Austrian types:
Teschner ocarina, image from an EBay auction
This was a bizarre experiment, with the basic fingering following the wholetone scale with auxiliary holes to raise the pitch by a semitone:
Keyed ocarina by Harry Bernard, Pennsylvania 1910
Sometime in the 1930s the American firm Gretsch started making ocarinas out of thermosetting plastics. These plastic ocarinas were sold in large numbers to the US military during WW2, with tunebooks and instructional materials to go along with them (an ideal soldier's instrument - light and pocketable, resistant to jungle mould). Here is a story about one that survived into the 1970s and (with the assistance of some LSD) inspired a Captain Beefheart song:
Most seem to have been blue like that one, but there were pink ones made for women in the US forces overseas. According to the Gretsch company timeline, which doesn't mention their ocarinas, the company stopped making instruments between 1942 and 1946 to assist in the war effort; so perhaps the supply was drying up by the later phases of the war.
You can see in those pictures that two of the holes were left unpierced; these were for the highest notes and were considered "advanced", so you filed them out when you got good enough to use them.
Gretsch ocarinas were even produced in sets with standard sizes to equip military ocarina quartets. Here is the cover of a collection of music published for these:
and there was an instruction book (downloadable from Giorgio Pacchioni's site; this requires registration) or here in PDF format
There can't be many complete quartet sets of Gretsch ocarinas for the military still in existence. This is a set of photos of the full package as it was sent out to the forces. The set may be for sale - not from me, but I can provide the owner's details if anybody's interested.
If there are any veterans of the US military reading this who played in such a group when on active service, I'd like to hear from you. And if anybody out there has a set of the ocarinas and could record some of the tunes from the Gretsch books on them, please let me know.
A common American word for the ocarina was "sweet potato flute", and they still turn up on EBay under that name. They were often referred to in popular culture under either name.
This is an instrument similar to the Gretsch, made in Germany and sold in the US and Australasia:
The cheapness of these plastic ocarinas allowed bizarre crazes like this to happen:
Billboard magazine, 11 Nov 1950
Something very similar to the Gretsch - so similar that it might be made from the same moulds - is still made. It doesn't have a very good reputation for playability but it's ridiculously cheap:
First Note ocarina
A similarly crude and cheap plastic ocarina, but of a different design, is sold very widely around the world under many brand names, "Dadi" being the commonest. Here's one of them. They don't sound very good.
Stagg ocarina
Until the 1960s, ocarinas were fairly common in Britain, sold at the same price range as mouth organs. These seem to have usually been plastic (and not very good; probably something like the First Note). In Scotland in the 1950s, they were sometimes given away free by rag collectors to people who gave them old clothes for recycling. But genuinely usable ocarinas were available as well.
From the beginning ocarinas have been made in many different sizes (the bigger the deeper), to be played together. This is the current product line of the German maker Hans Rotter - other makers have a comparable assortment.
Rotter ocarinas - photo by "fenrisfang" on Flickr
The consort scheme developed by Donati and still followed by most European makers has seven sizes with the all-fingers-down note alternating between C and G - low to high, C7, G6, C5, G4, C3, G2, C1. Comparing with other instruments, the lowest note of the C5 was middle C and its range is the lower end of the range of a normal flute; the G4 fell into the lower end of the range of the alto recorder; the C3 ("alto C" in American and Far Eastern makers' terminology) fitted into the lower end of the range of a descant recorder and mostly into that of an ordinary D whistle; the G2 was comparable to a sopranino recorder; and the C1 to a garklein recorder. Most makers have always made ocarinas in many other pitches. The numbering scheme used by Austrian makers seems to have counted every pitch in the catalogue, so you find their instruments bearing numbers like G23 (which on Donati's scheme would be the size of a whale). Compared with other instrument families, ocarinas don't go very deep - a C7 ocarina only goes as low as the low C on a viola. Because the sound is an almost pure sine wave they sound deeper than they are.
Music derived from the idiom of 19th century salon music for the flute was written for the ocarina in its early years:
Ocarinas were recorded very early. Here is a commercially released Edison cylinder recording which I found linked from a site that has an interesting explanation of why the ocarina was seen as having commercial potential, since this was an era when exotic sounds were being popularized by the recording industry:
Probably the most-recorded ocarina player ever was Mose Tapiero, who cut a large number of 78s in the first decade of the 20th century:
Here are a few videos and mp3 files showing what the Italian type of ocarina can do, in as many different idioms as I can find.
I used to play with an old mouth organ player, Iain Grant, who came from the same part of the country. He told me that when he was a kid (around WW2), ocarinas were widely available there, at about the same price as harmonicas. These were the plastic sort, like those made for the US military in WW2. Iain went for the harmonica instead, as did other players of his generation, and after Willie Kemp, nobody really followed on with the tradition. I play the same sort of tunes as Kemp does on that Spotify track, and in a somewhat similar style (he does more slides, I do more gracenotes), but the similarity is due to evolutionary convergence rather than influence - I'd heard of Kemp's playing years ago but first heard him long after I'd been playing the ocarina.
One of my ocarinas is a Mathieu low B flat I got off EBay, which had been left unsold at an auction house in Inverness. I couldn't trace its ownership back beyond that, but it's a good bet that Willie Kemp knew whoever played it. I have another ocarina (an unbranded Austrian ceramic 9-hole) which dates from before WW2 and was once played by a farmworker from Northamptonshire; it's heavily worn, he must have used it regularly for years. An easily portable instrument like the ocarina makes sense for an agricultural labourer.
The ocarina is, acoustically, based on the principle of the Helmholtz resonator; this means that the pitch varies with the volume of the instrument and the cross-sectional area of holes open. Exactly which holes are open doesn't make any difference to the pitch you get, so long as the open area is the same. So there are more opportunities for alternate fingerings than with most other woodwinds.
Following the usual convention for this type of ocarina, I've named the pitch of an ocarina as the note you get with all fingers and both thumbs down. Seven-fingers-down is the convention used for recorders; whistles have their pitch named after the six-finger note, a tone higher, so a C ocarina plays much like a C recorder (with German fingering) or D whistle (but with a natural F).
Here are some suggested fingerings for an ocarina in C, using cross-fingerings for chromatic notes. The note names use ABC conventions, so ^F is F sharp and _B is B flat. (The sol-fa names follow the Curwen system). Ocarinas are not all the same, and most notes can be bent a lot by varying breath pressure, so you may want to use different fingerings than these. Ocarinas vary most and are most pressure-sensitive at the top end of the range. For some, the top two notes are so out of tune or whispery as to be useless. (There's a lot of nine-note music available, so that doesn't make the instrument a write-off).
Some instruments have a split right-hand little finger hole, like a Baroque recorder, to make the semitone at the bottom easier to play. They have 11 holes but their acoustics and range is that of an ordinary 10-hole.
left right
==== =====
C do T1234 t1234
^C de T1234 t1234/ (half-hole)
D re T1234 t123-
_E ma T1234 t12-4
E mi T1234 t12--
F fa T1234 t1---
^F fe T1234 t--3-
G so T1234 t----
^G se T12-4 t--3-
A la T12-4 t----
_B ta T1--4 t--3-
B ti T1--4 t----
c do T---4 t----
^c de -1--4 t----
d re ----4 t----
_e ma ----4 ----- (Italian system)
_e ma ----- t---- (Austrian system)
e mi ----- t---- (Italian system)
e mi ----4 ----- (Austrian system)
f fa ----- -----
The rationale is to balance the instrument between left little finger and right thumb for as long as possible. Getting the top note without dropping the thing is tricky. (Another problem I have with the smallest ocarinas is getting my moustache mixed up with my fingers, as the left hand fingerholes are very close to the lips). You can see the difference between the Italian and Austrian systems even in a picture: the left-hand little finger hole is larger than the right thumbhole in the Italian system and the other way round in the Austrian one. The Italian system is a bit easier for music in keys with less than two flats, but there isn't much in it.
Semitones are achieved by cross-fingering. Using different fingers than the ones listed in the table may sometimes give better intonation or allow for microtonal variations (as in meantone intonation or Middle Eastern modal systems). It is also possible to get intermediate pitches and pitch slides by half-holing. It's as good for playing "in the cracks" as any fretless stringed instrument.
The American ocarina culture has developed its own notational system, a "tablature" which only represents pitch with no hint of rhythm or dynamics. It looks like this:
And since there are quite a few variant designs of ocarina, any tab notation like that is only useful to players who have exactly the same kind of ocarina as the transcriber. Not a good idea.
The sound of the ocarina is ear-catchingly weird. It will stand out in almost any instrumental group. It has very limited dynamic range without tone and intonation going way off, so you can't play on it both quietly and musically - if you don't have the confidence to handle the spotlight, just keep quiet.
To be more explicit, the dynamic range of a good Italian ocarina runs from very loud to ear-splitting. They were designed as instruments for the outdoors or for large halls, comparable in function to the trumpet, the accordion or the bagpipe. No other flute-like instrument comes anywhere near the volume of one of the higher-pitched members of the ocarina family (except just possibly the Catalan flabiol - I haven't played one). For a lot of folk music this is EXACTLY what you want.
Other instruments with limited dynamic and pitch range are folk shawms like the bombarde and duduk, the crumhorn, and most kind of bagpipe, so their repertoire will mostly work on the ocarina. Tunes for the Highland bagpipe are always written in the nine-note range from G above middle C to the A a ninth above that; if you intend to play a lot of Highland pipe tunes from sheet music you will need to learn to read it at pitch (which will be the correct concert pitch with a G ocarina - anything else and you'll need to transpose). Highland pipe music always has a key signature of two sharps, which not be printed explicitly on the score. The fingering of the G ocarina is vaguely similar to that of the pipe chanter, so pipe tunes feel quite natural on it when done in the right key, and many of the standard pipers' gracenote patterns work "straight out of the box". But the ocarina has a wider range, so pipe tunes can often be played in a choice of keys, though maybe they won't feel quite right. Here is a comparison of the fingerings of the pipe chanter and the G ocarina:
ocarina chanter ======= ======= left right left right a ----4 t---- ---- 123- g T---4 t---- T--- 123- f# T1--4 t---- T1-- 123- e T12-4 t---- T12- 123- d T1234 t---- T123 ---4 (or T 123 ---- until recently) c# T1234 t--3- T123 1--4 (or T 123 1--- until recently) B T1234 t12-- T123 12-- A T1234 t123- T123 123- G T1234 t1234 T123 1234
Some folk music idioms have a lot of tunes fitting the ocarina's range - French and Bosnian music are examples. Others have rather little music to offer - Irish music is probably the least suitable, as its melodies tend to have wide range. But where it does work, it can work well. Vocal melodies usually fit: "Danny Boy" is the sort of song that doesn't (ranging over an octave and a sixth).
For other idioms: mediaeval music and Renaissance dance music usually works well, if you ignore historical plausibility (Guillaume de Machaut might have loved the ocarina but he certainly never heard anything like one). Later classical music usually calls for a wide range, which requires arrangements using several ocarinas. Idioms where almost everything is improvised - jazz, blues or the modal idioms of the Middle East and India - are a good fit because you can do a lot of slides and microtonal subtleties, and it's your music so you get to decide the range.
One thing an ocarina is NOT, is a good educational instrument. I wouldn't recommend any type of ocarina as a first instrument for anybody unless they've already developed a very good ear for pitch. It's far too pressure-sensitive - most notes can be varied in pitch by about a tone by blowing harder or softer.
I adopt the mediaeval musician's attitude that you play whatever fits your instrument, rather than looking for music consciously composed for it, and a lot of music fits the Italian ocarina with little need for adaptation.
Japanese makers between the wars developed a variant of the Italian ocarina with two additional small "subholes" which extend the range by a minor third at the bottom (they are left open except for these very low notes). In practice only one of them ever works; the ergonomics is awful, making these extra holes impossible to play at speed, and the lowest note is so much quieter than the rest of the range (typically by about 10dB) as to be useless for most music. They may also have a weak or rough-sounding top note, requiring bizarre contortions to sound it properly. For fundamental acoustical reasons, an ocarina can't much exceed an octave and a fourth in usable range, and a 12-hole is trying to defy the laws of physics. The extended range mainly appeals to the gullible, or people playing themes from video games in their bedrooms. (Literally. There is a subculture of people who think of the ocarina as an instrument associated with video games, and put on headphones to play game music along with synthesized backing tracks. If you don't already know about this and aren't in search of the ultimate "Watching A Plank Warp" experience, I don't recommend trying to find out more).
Nonetheless, these 12-hole ocarinas are very widely available in the US and the Far East, and can be very good in the middle range where most music lies in practice. (They can also be appalling across the whole range; only the most upmarket makers are consistent throughout their product line, so research the specific instrument you're thinking of before buying. For the most part you get what you pay for). This is a basic plastic model (picture borrowed from Lazy River Ocarina, a blog teaching the ocarina from the basics, from an American perspective):
Noble alto C ocarina from Korea
There is a slight variation in the design of these ocarinas. The Noble ocarina has "Japanese subholes" - closed by the first and second fingers of the right hand. The alternative is "Taiwanese subholes", closed by the second finger of each hand. Some people think this matters. (Both of these ocarinas are reasonable value).
Focalink plastic alto C ocarina from Taiwan
The ocarina is still subject to crazes as it was in the heyday of the Gretsch. The biggest one at present is the result of its use in the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time video games.
Link the elf playing the ocarina
The ocarinas made to exploit the Zelda connection are of a variety of types despite their similar external appearance. Some are just plain weird; the ocarina depicted in the game has an almost unplayable fingerhole layout. Ocarinas made to look "Zelda-ish" always cost a lot more than those of comparable quality in other finishes. In increasing order of musical usefulness:
the Zelda ocarina, replica from the game, as played by elves
Zelda-themed Langley-fingered ocarina
STL Zelda ocarina
Spencer Zelda ocarina
10-hole alto C Zelda ocarina from Sixth Street Ocarinas
But this ocarina, from another bit of Japanese culture that caught on worldwide, has an odd design (only three right fingerholes) unlike either the Oriental or Italian designs:
for the benefit of colourblind viewers, it's pink
Here are some examples of good ocarinas of the Oriental type being played well.
The only Oriental 12-hole ocarina I have sounds better than my old Austrian 10-hole ocarina at the same pitch, but in practice I use the Austrian one far more, since I never use the Oriental one's subholes and with the 10-hole I don't have to keep thinking about how not to close them by accident.
One extra subhole (extending the range downwards by a semitone) doesn't damage the instrument's performance detectably. Not many Oriental ocarinas are made with 11 holes, but some Italian makers do it, and Kurt Posch has his own version with a subhole instead of the top-end hole; this is intended for Austrian, Swiss and Bavarian folk music, which often has a semitone at the bottom of the range.
This is a different idea for extending the instrument's range (the picture is taken from an EBay auction and I have never seen an instrument like this close up). It has two thumb-operated closed-standing keys for extra high notes. These probably didn't work any better than subholes.
That instrument had a tuning slide to vary the internal volume of the resonant cavity. These slides didn't work very well (the range of adjustment is less than what you can achieve by varying breath pressure) and they are rarely made now.
Because the ocarina can vary substantially in shape without the sound changing a lot, there have been a number of alternative designs over the years. One is the "in-line", basically tubular or cuboidal and blown at one end, with the fingerholes in two parallel rows or stretched out in one line. These probably go back into the distant past. A version made out of ibex or cow horn, the gemshorn, was used to a small extent in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, though it had very limited range and was never explicitly specified in any score. (The modern gemshorn, with the same range and capability as an ocarina and available in consorts, seems to be a reinvention of a past that never was).
Gemshorn from Sebastian Virdung's "Musica getuscht", 1513
Gemshorns by Pavel Číp, from the Lazar Early Music site
A Manchurian gemshorn from the Chinese firm Sound of Nature
A plastic gemshorn from the US maker Susato
Renaissance woodcut: Death bearing a gemshorn
Several recent makers have reinvented the in-line, often using modern materials. These are typical:
Ocarinas with multiple chambers sounding simultaneously to play drone or polyphonic music date back thousands of years in the Americas. Some of those early American designs were sophisticated in ways that present-day makers haven't managed to emulate or fully understand:
Each chamber can only have a limited range, but they can sound wonderful. There are a huge number of variant designs, most with very strange fingering systems. Here are some modern types.
Fabio Menaglio double harmony ocarina tuned in fourths
A different kind of multiple chamber ocarina is designed for the chambers to be played singly most of the time, to extend the range.
Vicinelli double ocarina from around 1900
modern Vicinelli-style double by Giorgio Pacchioni (top)
modern Vicinelli-style double by Giorgio Pacchioni (bottom)
modern Vicinelli-style double by Kurt Posch
Focalink "Forte" double ocarina
Focalink "Forte" triple ocarina
Pacchioni "Tripla Semplice" (top)
Pacchioni "Tripla Semplice" (bottom)
Something I have not found a picture of is a Compton Cube, which is an extreme bass ocarina used for the lowest octave of the biggest pipe organs. The idea was that in that range you would never need to play more than one note at a time, so it saved space not to use the usual set of single-pitch pipes. No human lungs could ever play one. There have been very large ocarinas designed for humans, but they are rare, expensive and look rather silly:
American design from the 1950s
a pig-sized Chinese keyed ocarina going down to the cello's low C
ocarinas with Langley-type "fingering", or rather "arming", where you need to cover the holes with your forearms
sound sample of Claudio Colombo's contrabass ocarina
A related instrument is called "xun" (or "hsun") in China and "borrindo" in north-west India and Pakistan. It has no windway, just an open tonehole like a flute. I have tried two xuns; one worked reasonably well, but I never managed to get more than the lowest few notes out of the other - the embouchure is much more difficult than a flute. But it's deeply expressive once you can control it, capable of some extraordinary sobbing sounds.
Two xuns, from a website about China in Hausa
The storyteller Bob Pegg points out in his show Roots and Flutes that one kind of xun is the oldest of all wind instruments, and in fact predates human life by billions of years. It sometimes happens that stones on the beach get a hole eroded through them by a smaller, harder stone, and the hole may have a sharp enough edge to be blown. Place your finger over the opposite side of the hole and you can get two distinct notes out of it. Simply blowing into a sharp-edged hole must predate the idea of a fipple everywhere, hence there are many instruments of this type around the world. Two African ones are described here:
Here are some videos of these instruments:
Even more remote from the ocarina in its design is the pucuy from the Comechingon culture in Argentina, which has a slot instead of a circular hole for the embouchure - you partly close the slot with your finger. A fippled version of the pucuy, allowing pitch to be varied by partially closing a slot, is the haggis caller, which doubles as a moneybank (going sharper as you save).
a Central American ocarina shaped like a quetzal bird
Most cultures that have had pottery ocarinas have tried making them in decorative shapes. Birds, frogs, fish, boats, human heads and bodies, and penises (yes, penises) have all been done many times, and even when the ocarina isn't shaped like an animal it may be decorated with animal motifs like this jaguar. The ocarina's ritual use in the Americas led to some bizarre imagery, of which this ocarina dedicated to the Flayed God Xipe Totec must be one of the most extreme.
Most of these have only had a limited range and were intended as toys or for ritual purposes, or as birdcalls. But they can be real instruments, made with Italian or in-line fingering systems:
By far the best-selling ocarina in the world is the Smule iPhone ocarina. Its fingering system is like a Langley, as far as I know. You don't see any great displays of virtuosity on it. This is about as good as it gets:
The acoustics of the ocarina is reasonably well documented on the web already, and I'd guess that anybody capable of understanding it is also quite capable of locating the relevant publications on their own, but I may add something about this someday...
I have a hard time believing this really exists even while listening to it, but:
It seems to scan all known internet radio streams for mentions of "ocarina" in the programme listing. Here is Nancy Rumbel in a programme about birds, playing along with a Common Potoo on her ocarina.
There are present-day makers of Italian-type ocarinas. My newest one is by Fabio Menaglio, still working in Budrio where the ocarina was invented and probably closer than anyone else to the original idea for the instrument. Here is his factory, its architecture redolent of centuries of craftsmanship:
Italian-type ocarinas show up on EBay every week, more often in the US than the UK. The commonest types you see there are the pottery models made by H. Fiehn or EWA in Vienna before WW1, and American-made bakelite ones. EBay France is worth looking at for Mathieu metal ocarinas.
I have a few Fiehn/EWA models but haven't tried one of the US military types. When buying from EBay, you want to check the range as well as the pitch - it's not a disaster if the top note or two is unplayable, but it may affect what you pay for it. Tunable ones can be very expensive. As a general rule, the more worn and scruffy the instrument is, the better it is (assuming nothing irreplaceable has been broken) - that shows it's been used intensively.
at the Selkirk Sessions festival 2006; © Ian Oliver, LRPS. Fiehn ocarina in C#.
at the Selkirk Sessions festival 2006; © Ian Oliver, LRPS. Fiehn ocarina in C#.
in Sandy Bells, Edinburgh, 2011. Austrian alto G ocarina.
A question: some time in late 2006, BBC Radio 3's "Late Junction" programme played some Kurdish ocarina music. I haven't found any more about it, and Late Junction isn't answering emails. Googling for the obvious keywords gets no useful hits, and a bizarre one where a Greek government site invented a Kurdish activist called Abdullah Ocarina by applying the Microsoft Word spellchecker to a document about Abdullah Öcalan. If anybody out there knows more, and in particular where to get that recording, please let me know.
