Posted by Alan Albright and His Ocarinas: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
On October 31, 2019, I purchased an Alan Albright double alto wooden ocarina on eBay from seller “madrone”. According to the seller, “it’s part of a collection of a friend’s late husband’s that I’m helping find homes for.” And there are “close to 90 other instruments”.
The ocarina arrived on November 5, 2019. Prior to its arrival, I messaged Ms. Nancy Rumbel and Ms. Sandi Schmidt (of Clayzeness) on Facebook, both of them familiar with Mr. Alan’s work. Later, I got Mr. Albright’s current email address from Ms. Rumbel and I wrote to him on Friday, November 8, 2019, with photos of my ocarina. The email, in part, reads:
Dear Mr. Albright, I hope this email finds you well. [A short introduction of myself.] I have started to play ocarina in summer 2018 and recently I have purchased from ebay one of your beautiful double wooden ocarina. I have attached a few photos of it.
I got your email from Ms. Nancy Rumbel, and I have learned about your story from various online sources, and from Ms. Rumbel and Ms. Sandi Schmidt.
I am also an avid collector of ocarinas. I now own almost 100 ocarinas and yours is my first wooden ocarina. When I get an old ocarina, I love to learn about its history and the stories of its maker(s). And hence I have decided to write to you. I hope this email correspondence will eventually lead to an opportunity to meet you in person and to listen to your stories, especially those with ocarinas. I hope one day I will write down those stories to share with every ocarina lover.
I have started a website: www.theocarinamuseum.com It’s very raw right now. But I hope one day I will own my small ocarina museum.
The next morning, at 7:32am U.S. Central time, I received a reply:
Thank you for your email. Your website looks very fine and professional!
You seem to have all the bases covered, beginning with exchanges with Nancy and Cynthia. A few other contacts might be interesting for you:
Charlie Hind, a maker of wooden double ocarinas of his own design: https://hindocarina.com/
John Thompson, a Canadian collector of all sorts of musical instruments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIOTCTN_zxo
For my own instruments, I could quickly answer you with two dimensions in mind: the “spiritual” and the material. As preface to this, I should refer to a course I took with Professor Skinner, the renowned behaviorist. “We cannot accurately study the inner life of a human…” he began, walking to the backboard. “…so well simply draw a circle around it and call it a ‘black box.'” He paused, and then delivered the essence of his approach: “After that, we’ll study the correlations between input and output to that black box.”
Naturally, to me, the most interesting was what was in that “black box”, namely “me”—and not the various methods of manipulating my behavior which, by the way, only work when I am unaware of it!
So the “black box” dimension of my instruments began with my father’s great interest in music, coming from his mother and her musical family, but also from his father—an expert on the musical saw. Dad was head of the Dartmouth College Glee Club, when he was there, and he saw to us that we took music lessons (solfège and piano). So, in a modest way, all of his children are musicians—my brother, Ned, professionally so.
Music and language are related by nature—and I found myself studying languages at school. Thus, I became a French teacher at Phillips Academy Andover, where I went to school. It was there that I discovered what that sort of educational training for the elite is all about and, as many of my generation, I “jumped ship.” Instead of accepting the offer to become a fulltime teacher at Andover, I fled to New York City where I found employment as an Intake worker at the Bureau of Child Welfare. Then I was drafted and, after two years service in Germany, I returned to my old job…. now assigned to East Manhattan. I quickly realized that my military experience had made me far more sensitive to other people and therefore I was still too young and inexperienced to do a job whose consequences had great influence on the personal and family lives of my “clients” (or “black boxes”, if you will!)
The result was that I left Child Welfare and began working for Young Life, thanks to Calvin Moy, a fellow Child Welfare worker, who found me this job teaching English in Chinatown to immigrant teenagers from Hong Kong, mostly.
It wasn’t long before I realized that the best way for these kids to learn English was not in a formal setting—but by working with English-speakers. Steve Rowles, an old family friend and I, often discussed this over coffee. What sort of employment could we create to put this boys to work? After graduating from NYU with a degree in English, Steve was driving a taxi…. To make a long story short, we both concluded that we could make simple bamboo flutes (that’s a story in itself)—which is how Remarkable Flutes came into being. We sold them on the streets of NY’s Greenwich Village and at craft shows. No businessmen, we were barely able to survive ourselves, but never could put anyone to work…. much less immigrant street kids from the Far East!
During the last of my four-year adventure with Remarkable Flutes, I had been keeping statistics on my sales with a simple code. After pocketing the money, I would write down something like: “3F2G”, translated as “a three-dollar flute sold to a female in her twenties who bought it as a gift.” The first number enabled me to project sales and therefore prepare for craft shows. The other three numbers were for my own interest, and what a shock I had to add up the year’s statistic and find that I had sold to equal numbers of “F”s and “M”s—for I had always assumed the contrary, as that close-up contact with potential customers (in order to show them how to make a sound on the instruments) was much more interesting to me with the girls than with the boys!
“Okay, smartie!” I said to myself. “Why don’t you apply your mathematics to the making of the flutes, not just the selling?” And that was the beginning of my adventure with ocarinas!
Quick measurement of the six finger holes on the flute…. with the five different sizes I was making… quickly demonstrated that the placement of said holes was proportional to the length. A very simple fact which I had always known about (in theory) but now fully understood after four years of “practice”.
“The flutes are yours,” I then said to my friend Steve. I’d learned my lesson and was now ready for something more interesting. It was then that my sister showed me that little English ocarina-pendant and we both quickly figured out the cross-fingering necessary to coax a diatonic scale of eight notes using four finger holes in different combinations. As I had woodworking tools for the making of bamboo flutes, it was natural to look to make instruments out of wood—and little ocarinas was the result. Not very inspiring until I put two together. And the rest you know.
To conclude with the “black box” dimension, the instrument represents (for me) the great mystery of Duality. Two animated by One. And I’ll leave it at that.
The material side of this new adventure could be summed up by the word “wood.” The photo you’ve sent me is an example of some African wood…. a substitute on the market for mahogany, whose fame goes back to beautiful Cuban varieties. On the back of the instruments, you can see the tiny “tuning” holes which I drilled to bring the two voices into their desired relation as musical fourths—inverted fifths, in truth, making the higher voice the lead one for the right hand, with the lower voice on the left for accompaniment. This reflects my experience as a piano-player.
This message has gotten far too long, but you seem to be a serious student of these things, so I hope you’ll excuse me!
My reply, in part, reads:
At the online forum “The Ocarina Network” (which now has an active Facebook group), I read the following (https://theocarinanetwork.com/alan-albright-wood-double-ocarinas-t9120.html):
“
That’s an old one which I (Alan Albright) made in the 70s, before moving from Warwick, NY to San Francisco. I can tell by the thin blowhole openings. While Charlie Hind, (http://hindocarina.com/) —an accomplished musical instrument maker who didn’t start making doubles until I stopped in 1985— uses the musical interval of a fifth, I only made a few of that design—-and possibly this one, given its overall width. However, I by far preferred the “inverted fifth” as the interval, because it puts the “DO” on the high voice, with the “SOL” below. This design reflects my background as a (lousy) piano player, leading with the high voice in the right hand and bumbling along below with the left. Nancy Rumbel is the champion player of this instrument . (http://www.nancyrumbel.com/) Someone else drilled the hole at the bottom to convert the instrument into a pendant. In 1997-2001, I passed on “trade secrets” to Tom & Cynthia Smith, who’ve been improving the instrument ever since. www.doubleocarina.com. Since early 1985, I moved on to other things, as evidenced here: www.ourstory.info
“
I don’t know if it is intended or not, but an “inverted fifth” allows he instrument to be used easily as two single chamber. Cornell Kinderknecht has used it that way, and I have quickly realized that it can be used that way when I first get the instrument. I use the lowest three notes on the left chamber for “Sol La Si”, then move to the right chamber for the full octave. I prefer it this way, as many of the Chinese folk musics I like to play goes down to the low Sol. Alternatively, we can use the left chamber for the full octave, and use the highest three notes of the right chamber as “Re Mi Fa”.
Why have you decided to stop making ocarinas in 1985 (other than the quick reason noted in the above quoted message from TON)?
A reply came at 9:38am:
Ready for my second cup of espresso this morning…. and you’ve already answered my last.
Why did I cease making ocarinas in early 1985? The simple answer is that I moved to France in the first days of February of that year. My wife (at the time) was French.
A less simple answer is that I was escaping an “economic prison”—the sort of one which traps us all. We need to survive, to pay the rent, etc. And I was doing that for ten years by making ocarinas. I’d become a sort of one-man factory, engaged in repetitive actions where a saving grace was using different types of beautiful wood…. Lots of “work”, but very little creativity.
No, Mr. Skinner, we are not machines—even if we sometimes act like them, mirroring the marvelous machine which we use to live our lives on Planet Earth, and which we must feed in order to survive….
So what are we, other than “drivers” of “vehicles”? The famous Socratean “who” question.
Meanwhile, music… a dimension whose outer form suggests a close relation to mathematics.
For example: the overtone series. Not only does the major triad appear as you divide that soundwave more and more, but soon enough you get an almost-complete diatonic scale up there around the fifth or sixth overtone series!
That said, the musician is aware of, but only plays with, all this math. Sure, with Autumn Leaves and the like, the draw of the Circle of Fifths is almost irrestible. But something else is happening.
The old “hack” is: Music is the language of the soul.
Let’s use modern terminology, despite our modern emphasis on the materialistic view, and say “self” instead of “soul”—acknowledging that both the emotional and mental realms we live in are immaterial.
Gosh, think of all those folks singing in the shower, when they think nobody is listening….
The shower-singing is operating in an immaterial realm, while materializing the “play.”
Here, “musician”, “artist” and other practicioners of creativity share an overall role of “shaman” with doctors, psychiatrists, priests and teachers. This is in the context of a division of social roles into three mutually-exclusive roles/worldviews: Warrior (or protector of social order), Hunter-Gatherer (physical maintenance) and Shaman (the link between Immaterial and Material).
We live in a time where the Hunter-Gatherer worldview predominates…. which gives rise to much misinterpretation. A “shamanic” activity of converting what comes through one’s Self —invaluable or worthless to the listener—might be re-encapsulated as a commodity on a market and given a price! A “nobody” paints a worthless picture which, materialized by a “somebody” like Van Gogh, might be worth millions in the eyes of wealthy collectors!
All this to explain why I, as a “creator”, gave up my economic role as Hunter-Gatherer, harvesting ocarinas in order to survive—like a porpoise fishing underwater coming up for air.
So I moved to France and began an new “incarnation”…. surviving best I could (by teaching, translation work), while putting my main creative energies into researching the history of the American Field Service, having been an AFS exchange student to France thirty years before. This gave rise to : http://ourstory.info. Many adventures!
In all of this—music and life in other cultures—there is a common theme, what one might call “colored glasses.” Music certainly “colors” one’s experience in the moment—hence its use as “background”, inspiring us or merely manipulating us as little “black boxes” (re: muzak in shopping malls). And culture definitely shapes how one interprets what is happening around one, not to mention the perception of same.
Perhaps I should end this “rant” with a Sufi story. A group of students were following their teacher through the marketplace (in some central Asian country) when they spotted a table of revelers, each smiling and smacking his lips as he downed his food. In front of each was a heaping plate of camel dung. The students looked at their teacher. “They think it’s lamb,” he said.
The email exchange went on throughout the day and by the end of the day, I had received 6 long emails from Mr. Albright. But our other emails went on to topics not as related to ocarinas.
As a bonus: Mr. Albright has also shared with me photos of two of his recent works: a stair bannister and a deck railing.