Finding music to play on the ocarina
As of the time of writing very little music has been written specifically for the ocarina, but there is still a huge wealth of music available to play, including:
- Vocal music. The untrained human voice has a similar range to a single chambered ocarina, and most vocal music can be adapted pretty easily.
- Bagpipe music. Like ocarinas, many different kinds of bagpipe have a small range, and most of this music can be easily adapted to the ocarina. This includes music for the highland bagpipe, Swedish sackpipa and French cornemuse du centre.
- Music for other limited range instruments. For instance all music published for the 4 hole harmonica can be played on the ocarina and Pat Missin's 'The Ultimate Miniature Harmonica Tunebook' would be a great resource for beginners.
- Original compositions. There are a small number of original compositions for the ocarina which mostly comes from the Italian ocarina septet tradition. They can be found online.
- Music arranged for ocarina. There is an increasing amount of music available for ocarina ensembles and solo performers that has been arranged for the ocarina, which can also be found online.
As a fully chromatic instrument with a limited range, ocarinas do offer the possibility of playing music modulating between musical modes within the same range. Their unstable pitch also opens up a lot of options for performance of microtonal music.
But because of their limited range, ocarinas do not work like other instruments where one can play everything using one instrument. Rather one must use multiple ocarinas in different keys to cover the required range of notes for a given song.
The note ranges covered by different ocarinas are addressed in the article Ocarina keys and pitch ranges. For instance, a single chamber alto C ocarina can play from about C5 to F6.
It is also worth noting that the timbre (tone colour) and volume dynamics between the high and low notes vary hugely from one ocarina to another. What is desirable will depend on the music you are playing.
These factors are set when the ocarina is made and can not be changed. See Ocarina playing characteristics and timbre for guidance.
How music for the ocarina is notated
Music for the ocarina is usually written using standard music notation in treble clef.
On single chambered ocarinas notes in different octaves are normally just called 'high' or 'low', for example 'high C' and 'Low C'. Every note from the low C until the B above is called 'low', while the second C to second F are called 'high'.
The first ledger line C on the staff is usually considered to be 'low C' on the ocarina, regardless of the pitch range of the ocarina:
- An alto (tenor) C sounds an octave higher than written, and a soprano C sounds 2 octaves higher.
- A bass C ocarina sounds at written pitch, and a contrabass sounds an octave lower than written.
- Multichamber ocarinas follow the same convention, On multichambers that sound more than two octaves, notes may be named using scientific octave numbers such as 'C4, C5, C6' to avoid ambiguity.
Ocarinas that are in keys besides C may be handled in one of two ways:
- By reading music at written pitch. For example, if an ocarina is in G, the low G would be written as the second line from the bottom of the staff.
- By treating the ocarina as a transposing instrument. In this case if an ocarina is in G, the low G would be written as C, 'as if' the ocarina was in C.
Ocarina ensemble music is commonly notated with all parts transposed into C, and written on the treble clef, including bass and contrabass ocarinas.
learning to read music at written pitch on ocarinas in different keys is very valuable, allowing you to play any music you encounter without needing to first transpose it into C.
