The Ocarina - The Oldest Musical Instrument Of Mankind
I'd like to tell you about a very special instrument. It has been gaining an increasingly larger following within the past 10 years. Though its growth in status is still fairly new, it's in fact something so very old it is simply mind-boggling.
No matter if you're musical or not, surely you are aware of most classical instruments, including guitars, harps, trumpets, violins and the like. However, have you stumbled upon the ocarina before?
Ocarinas are a family of vessel flutes, featuring a closed chamber riddled with finger holes. Interestingly, it is able to play a lot more notes than it has holes and can have any shape a craftsman wants. Shape and the hole locations make almost no difference. This fact enables an ocarina to come in a lot of forms and be kind of a piece of art in itself. The pinnacle of this is probably the dragon tooth ocarina.
An ocarina can even be made out of virtually all materials - clay, ceramic, plastic, metal, stone and so forth. Because of this artistic freedom, I sometimes describe it as the "paradise bird" among flutes. The ocarina comes in all imaginable forms, sizings and colorations, whereas other wind instruments such as recorders need a particular material and a certain form to function.
But you want me to tell you how old it is, right?
Instruments comparable to the modern ocarina have been used for over twelve thousand years. Actually, the first vessel flutes have been found in central Africa and date back to over 30,000 years, which makes it without question the oldest instrument of our species.
I find this fact remarkable! The ocarina and its older brothers have been with mankind over all of its history. They were altered in shape and cultural use, but their sound remained the same. Any standard classical instrument is an infant when put next to vessel flutes.
Different peoples have invented stone or clay instruments independently from one another. For instance, the Chinese have the xun. It is over seven thousand years of age and is still popular today. Then there's the medieval German gemshorn. It was made out of the horn of a goat. Lastly, don't forget the Aztecs, who used these flutes in their traditional music and rituals. After the Aztecs had been conquered, their clay flutes found their way to the European continent and eventually Italy, where Giuseppe Donati changed them into what we know as the ocarina.
The united states got the ocarina early in the 20th century, and it was very popular among American soldiers. Many carried ocarinas with them during World War 1 and played them to boost their morale. In WW2, the US military actually issued these instruments to soldiers all over Europe, which reflects how important the instrument was back then.
After the war, public awareness of the ocarina decreased. It never became a part in the western lifestyle. Nonetheless, it was used in a few well known songs, such as “Wild Thing”.
Throughout the East, the ocarina has always been much more common. Virtually every Asian knows the instrument the way you are aware of the piano. Because of this, it frequently finds a role in film, music or video games. And it is due to this that the ocarina is getting ever more fashionable in the west. Particularly through Japanese games, the instrument has found a way right into popular culture and into the minds and hearts of young and old.
Particularly, the Zelda video games contain the ocarina as a legendary instrument and artifact. When this game was released back in 98, the ocarina had a boom in people's awareness that is unlikely to decline again. You can actually buy a Zelda ocarina nowadays.
But the ocarina is much more than a simple clay flute or a toy made popular by a game. As a matter of fact, it is a professional musical instrument that is designed for ensemble play. It has an ancient sound different from all other flutes, simply because it won't make over-tones. That circumstance grants it a very mellow, gentle tone, clean and concentrated on that one note it creates each and every instant. This otherworldly feature of its music is just as unique as its shape and history.
