Blog and News

ED Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, introduced an Ocarina to the House of Commons yesterday. The Guardian Newspaper reported:
“The schools secretary struck a musical note at question time by producing an Ocarina. But he stopped short of playing a tune, opting instead to hold the yellow plastic instrument aloft and declare: ‘That, Mr Speaker, is an ocarina.’ He was responding to an unrelated question from Tory Philip Hollobone, whose Kettering constituency is the centre of the UK’s ocarina industry.” Read more

Figures just released by Government show that ocarinas formed 8.6% of all musical instruments bought in 2007/2008 using the New Instrument Purchase Fund.

The Fund was set up to enable every primary school child in England to learn to play a musical instrument free of charge.

In 2007/08, the first of four consecutive years of £10Million investments provided nearly 100,000 musical instruments at an average price of just over £100 per instrument. Read more

Our Brazilian friend, Marcia Contador, wrote to us from her home near Sao Paolo about twelve ocarina concerts that she presented in 2007. She commented:

“the acoustic inside the church was heavenly. My Bass Ocarina filled the whole church and echoed beautifully, especially when played on the rear balcony”. Read more

The National Festival of Music for Youth 2005 involved over 100,000 young musicians. Of the many groups taking part, a few were invited to perform in the finals, where Outstanding Performance Awards were made for the most exceptional performances.

Our Ocarina group of fifteen players, aged 8 to 12 years, were surprised to be selected for the finals, and completely amazed to receive the Outstanding Performance Award in the Junior class. Their performance was captured on the day from a distance, and rehearsals show how they prepared for this peak of achievement. Read more

The word Ocarina is a favourite with crossword compilers. They like the word because it’s familiar to many people, but few know what it actually means. Ocarina also contains a lot of vowels for its size, which is apparently really useful in the world of crossword creation.

So, what’s in a name? I came across the following and thought you might be as amused as I was by the unexpected rearrangement of letters in the following pairs of words… Read more

Do you remember painting by numbers? Well we’re going to play music by numbers. So first of all, look at your 4-hole Oc. If it’s not handy, just look at the picture below and see if you can identify…

How many finger-holes does it have? How many different notes can it play?

Okay. We have a 4-hole Ocarina. It plays 11 notes by covering different combinations of holes. Read more

In 1995, the BBC featured school assemblies in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales and asked to include ocarinas. We sent them to Edinburgh and the resulting song is below. All other songs in the programme were accompanied by sixth form students and professional musicians. This song was entirely accompanied by nine and ten year old children on ocarinas. The main tune is played on 90 plastic school ocarinas whilst the five harmony parts are played by a small group on Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass ceramic ocarinas. Read more