Posted by Alan Albright and His Ocarinas: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
A series of emails correspondence can be found here: http://www.clayz.com/baz/AAllb.html; http://www.clayz.com/baz/AAllb1.html, http://www.clayz.com/baz/AAllb2.html, http://www.clayz.com/baz/AAllb3.html, http://www.clayz.com/baz/AAllb4.html, http://www.clayz.com/baz/AAllb5.html
For consistency and readability, I am copying them below. I applied some formatting, and also added comments [in blue]. There are also a small number of typos which I had not corrected. These correspondence bears the title “Dance to the Music of the Ocarina, Wilhemina” on the original website.
The globular flute is a very old instrument. Egg-shaped forms of it come down to us from Old China and the pre-Columbian South American natives were adepts of creating vessels to hold and vary the rates of vibrating air.
Sometime in the mid-1960s, a relatively-young English mathematician, John ***** [John Taylor], studied a number of South American globular flutes (achronically now known as ocarinas) and concluded that there was some sort of pattern, that the different sizes of the fingerholes had some functional purpose.
It wouldn’t surprise me, given the results, that John was already familiar with recorders and their “cross fingering”, for he went on to develop a little four-holed globular flute….the holes of progressively larger size. Different combinations of open holes—behold the mathematician at work!—in series would produce an almost entire chromatic scale over the range of one octive.
The form of these little creatures was streamlined, made most attractive, and suspended by a cord around the neck of their purchasers, thanks to an additional hole which did not communicate with the interior chamber of the instrument.
My sister, Susan, showed me one of these in 1974. Her cello teacher had lent it to her. Susan also plays the recorder and cross-fingering was therefore no mystery to her. She demonstrated the scale. I memorized the intervals of the four holes, opened progressively with no cross fingering: DO, RE, [FA,] LA, DO.
At that particular time, I had become tired of making simple six-holed bamboo flutes. Moreover, I had discovered to my disgust that I had worked for some four years, producing tens of thousands of such flutes, without ever really having understood the law of proportions—although I thought I knew all about it. I should like to say that the fault was not my own stupidity, but the fact that my prestigious education had taught me how to perform mental gymnastics to please my masters, not how to think for myself. In any case, it was my use of elementary statistics to record sales data and project craftshow needs based on such which brought me to finally apply mathematics to the making of the flutes themselves. The simplicity and obviousness of the results were so patent that I felt like a fool and still do. It was time to get out of the flute-making business and do something more challenging.
My sister’s visit coincided, then, with a time of experimentation for me. I had told my partner, Steve Rowles (who makes fine violins and violas these days), that he could have the flutes and I was going to do something else. I was experimenting with other forms of wood folk instruments—whistle flutes in particular. As a rather terrible but enthusiastic piano player, I was not satisfied with the single-voiced approach of things like flutes and ocarinas and therefore was working on ways to make multiple-voiced wind instruments—beginning with doubles. Susan’s input showed me that this tactic might well produce more than a “toy”, since John’s design suggested the possibility for a cross-fingering adept to play two voices at once with a range of an octave for each voice.
Determining the interval between the two voices—low and high—was simple for me, a low-level ivory tinkler. Low voice: left hand. Lead voice: right hand. “DO” therefore in the right hand. Musically speaking, the closest thing to “DO” in the harmonic progression, after the octave, is the fifth, “SOL”. So fifth it would be….but the one below “DO”, of course, not above. (My limited musical skills did not include improvising descant with the lead voice below the harmonies.) In all appearance, then, the doubles would be tuned “DO”—“FA”—even though, in practice, the “FA” would prove to be the “DO”.
The results were better than I had imagined. Fortunately, I had begun my musical career, thanks to Margharita Hastings, our Italo-American teacher in Bedford, NY, with solfège, and I’d also had years of singing in glee clubs and choirs. This made me sensitive enough to musical intervals to do a reasonably good job of tuning the two voices to themselves and to each other. It also made me aim for as good voicing as possible—to which I should add my two sisters’ influence as practicioners of the recorder.
Thus, wood double ocarinas of this design began to appear in 1974 and kept appearing until I’d had quite enough in January of 1985 when my French wife and I moved to France “for a year”—which for me lasted almost ten years.
The relative success of my instruments was first of all due to the particularities of the marketplace for fine handcrafts which had slowly developed in the wake of Sputnik. After the Russians had thumbed their noses at Western Technology with their German-inspired rocketry, the US Government began to pour millions into schools of ceramics, such as Alfred College in New York State, in order to develop a technology which could produce materials which would withstand the high temperatures assaulting the noses of rockets reentering the progressively dense atmosphere of Planet Earth.
This had a trickle-down effect on the artists lurking in said ceramic schools. They were delighted and even inspired by all the new tools and toys they were suddenly given. Both ceramics and glass blowing began to flourish….to the point that the artists were emboldened to offer their work for sale. The first Northeast Craft Fair was held in Connecticut in the mid-1960s….eventually working its way to Bennington, Vermont, then Rhinebeck, NY and now Springfield, Mass. (Ron Burke, a ceramicist living in Maine, is best qualified to write the history of what he calls the “American Craft Fair Movement.”)
Steve Rowles and I brought our bamboo flutes to Bennington in June of 1970. The vast majority of our fellow exhibitors there were ceramicists….and fine ones at that. We represented the small group of oddball “hippy” miscellanea….which was fine, because the counter-cultural revolution was on and our more staid contemporaries were happy to encourage us by buying anything we made. (A fortunate circumstance which continued until the petrol crisis of 1974).
Fine American handcrafts soon became “cheap, affordable art”—and fodder for the gift market. Women were much more enthusiastic about this, of course, as is usual with the fine things of life. (American men are more interested in automobiles, guns and other forms of mechanical power….) Nonetheless, men are subject to their women and to gift-giving….
Thus it was that my wood double-ocarinas found their niche in the category of something one could give to a man….. wood being more of a man’s material than ceramics, which is traditionally to be found in the hands of a woman puttering about the kitchen or adorning the house with flowers.
I shall therefore have to admit that, alas and alack, despite all my best intentions of furnishing a simple musical folk instrument to the masses, my products have mostly ended up as décor….the fate of many good intentions.
Nonetheless, a few serious musicians, such as oboe-player Nancy Rumbel, discovered the musical potential and joy of a double globular flute tuned according to the lights of our John, the English mathematician, and given their interval, voicing and form by me, the amateur piano-player, brother of recorder players and admirer of the rounded stones one finds on the beach…
For the past 14 years, I would get regular telephone calls from Nancy. “When are you going to make those ocarinas again,” she’d ask. “Never,” I’d respond. One just does not relive past lives, as much fun as it is to reminisce about them. Life moves on.
Finally, Nancy sent me Tom. She was worried that, one day, her ocarinas (which had long since represented her “bread and butter” on the music circuit where she performs with guitarist Erik Tingstad) would fall apart. Tom Smith had contacted her since he and his wife (a clarinet player) had long collected “Albright ocarinas” and he had even taken one apart in order to see how it was made….the result being the first “Tom Smith” wooden double ocarina which he gave his wife as a Christmas present in 1997.
Fortunately, Tom does not have to earn his living making folk instruments in an era devoted to more serious things such as Nintendo and institutionalized voyeurism. He works for the Federal Government in Alaska where he, a scientist, observes the behavior of grizzly bears. He’s quite good at it and has made a name for himself by pointing out the these large creatures are attracted by red pepper spray, not repelled by it.
For almost two years, now, I’ve been answering all Tom’s technical questions about the various details of ocarina construction. We are dialoguing in a scientific spirit, our heros being more of the type of Helmholz (“The Sensation of Sound”) rather than Donati of Budrio…. My hope is that Tom will master the givens of the problem, as illustrated by my experience, and go on to make truly masterful instruments.
Meanwhile, the forms of my double globular flutes—persisting after my flight from the American Dream to the cafés of modern France—inspired a South Carolinian by the name of Charles Hind to apply his own perspectives to the creation of such things. I have heard that he found his way to the manufacture of his family of doubles through organ-pipe technology. In any case, I don’t believe he adopted the four-hole design and I know that he opted for an interval of a fifth between the two voices, the the “DO” remaining resolutely below its projected “SOL”. Finally, I don’t believe that he had the benefit of sharp-eared sisters who would apply a recorder aesthetic to the voicing of his instruments…. In any case, in the present-day commerce of wood double ocarinas, Mr. Hind is “it” and his products can be easily found.
To return briefly to the single globular flute, I did produce singles (for money-making purposes) made out of wood, of ceramics and of pewter. In around 1977-8, David Petraglia, Alan Supina and I—all members of the crafts collective known as Chardavogne—put our heads together and worked out all the technical details of producing pretty little Brancusi-like ocarina-pendants from rubber moulds. We had visions of material fortunes amassed from the light manufacture of what we hoped would be a popular success. We did not count on our own own capacity for personal misunderstandings and the difficulty of human enterprise in small groups. However, we did inspire a couple of competitors at the WBAI Christmas Craft Show—Doug Diehl and Robin Hodgkinson—to take up the idea of the four-holer and make their own versions from extruded clay. Although these craftsmen first denied that their creation had anything to do with us–despite certain obvious details—Doug later fessed up after he had struck off on his own. Robin is still at it 22 years later, “THE” ocarina man on the crafts circuit.
In my short experience, there were two other whistle flute makers whose development had nothing at all to do with my instruments: Farmer Fartwhistle (who was at Bennington in 1970) and Anita ***** [Anita N. Feng] who first worked out of Rhode Island and now lives somewhere in the Midwest or the West, I believe.
In any case, single-voiced wind instruments never interested me as much as the doubles. Even a triple wasn’t all that interesting. I suppose that, beyond the obvious needs of a piano player without a piano, I was attracted to what is embodied in the old mythical “aulos” which one sees represented on Greek vases….or foisted off on tourists, in most approximative form, as double-whistles coming from Yugoslavia or Roumania:
The double flute is both metaphor and illustration of the mystery of duality: two in one. How can two seemingly independent voices emanate from a Single Source? Aha! Advaita Vedanta or not, I can tell you that it’s something that’s fun to do!
Falmouth-Foreside, Maine
The morning of the eclipse, August 11, 1999.