ocarina

Ocarina comes from the Italian oca, meaning goose, with the diminutive suffix -rina: little goose. The name refers to the instrument's shape — its oval, rounded body with a beak-like mouthpiece does resemble a cartoon goose, and the instrument's inventor, the Italian teenager Giuseppe Donati of Budrio, near Bologna, apparently embraced the comparison when he gave it the name around 1853. Donati did not invent the concept of a vessel flute — round clay flutes with finger holes predate his design by millennia — but he standardized the form, developed a fingering system, and most importantly assembled the first ocarina ensemble, a group of musicians who performed on ocarinas of different sizes pitched to cover the full musical range, essentially a wind band made entirely from clay goose-shaped instruments.

Pre-Columbian vessel flutes that function on the same acoustic principle as the ocarina were made throughout Mesoamerica, with examples found in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Colombia dating back over 3,000 years. The Aztec tradition produced particularly elaborate ceramic flutes in animal and human forms, many with sophisticated multiple-chamber designs. These instruments were not ancestors of Donati's ocarina — they developed independently — but they demonstrate that the vessel flute principle (a sealed resonating chamber with finger holes rather than an open tube) is a convergent discovery, arrived at separately by cultures across the world. The ocarina's acoustic physics are straightforward enough that they were apparently obvious to any culture that worked seriously with clay and sound.

The ocarina's spread beyond Budrio was slow but steady through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Donati's ensemble toured Europe, and the instrument became a novelty with modest but persistent popularity. In the United States, a sweet potato-shaped ceramic version became known as the 'sweet potato' — an informal name that persisted for decades. Military bands in World War I reportedly included ocarinas among the instruments soldiers carried, given their portability, near-indestructibility, and ability to produce a recognizable melody even in amateurs' hands. The instrument occupied a position between serious instrument and toy throughout this period, never quite achieving the respect accorded to the flute family from which it was distinguished by its construction and fingering system.

The ocarina's cultural transformation came with Nintendo's 1998 video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, in which the protagonist Link plays an ocarina to solve puzzles and advance the narrative. The game became one of the most critically acclaimed in video game history; the Ocarina of Time has been repeatedly ranked as one of the greatest games ever made. Millions of players learned what an ocarina was through this game, and a significant number subsequently learned to play the real instrument. Ocarina sales spiked; ocarina tutorials multiplied; the instrument's community grew by orders of magnitude. A small clay goose from Budrio became globally famous through a fictional goose-shaped flute played by an animated elf in a fantasy kingdom. The diminutive suffix -rina had never been more apt.