Vessel whistles and flutes are used in most parts of the world. All share the same characteristic that, unlike other flutes, instead of there being a tube with a column of air, there is a vessel, more or less globular, containing a body of air. As a result, they behave differently from other flutes in that the position of a fingerhole on the body makes little difference to the pitch produced when it is opened. A larger hole in one place will produce the same pitch as two or more smaller holes in other places, provided that their area is the same. What counts is the area of open hole, and in that respect the embouchure equates with fingerholes: It also is an open hole. Thus with simple edgeblown vessel flutes, the embouchure is often interchangeable with one or another fingerhole.
As soon as there is more than one hole, there are many musical possibilities. Two holes of differing diameter will produce four notes: both closed, one open, the other open, and both open. The small modern vessel flutes with four fingerholes, often seen hanging around the player’s neck on a thong and first developed by John Taylor in London in the 1960s, will provide a complete scale. Two-hole vessel flutes of pottery are found in New Guinea, and wooden ones shaped rather like daggers with two side holes in bulbous or projecting wings, sometimes with a third hole at the bottom end, are in Africa. Some peoples use these as hunting whistles, others for playing music, an example of the difficulty of separating whistles from flutes. Pre-Columbian examples from Central America, often in animal or bird shapes, are well known, and some can be seen in figure 3.4. While some have only one or two fingerholes, others have four or more.
The oldest-known vessel flutes date back to around 4000 BC in China. These were small egg- or ball-shaped vessels called xun, initially with one or two holes; by the third century BC, they had five holes, and by the eighteenth century AD six or more.20 The later ones have a flattened bottom, though still more or less egg-shaped, and similar instruments with six holes, four for the fingers in front and two behind for the thumbs, are still made. It is possible that the egg shape arose as a fertility symbol, but more probably it derived from an earlier gourd or seed. Certainly it is unlikely that pottery was the first form of the instrument in China, and thus we can presume that the origin is even earlier.
Our own ocarinas were invented in the mid-nineteenth century by Giuseppe Donati in Budrio, Italy. He devised the torpedo shape, with a wing containing the mouthpiece and duct, calling it “a little goose” (ocarina in Italian) from its resemblance to the beak of that bird.21 From Budrio, they spread across the world. They have been made in many materials, as well as the plain pottery that Donati employed. High-quality porcelain examples were made in Dresden by the successors to the Meissen factories; metal has often been used, as well, and today plastic. The Mezzetti brothers, who also came from Budrio, set up their workshop in Paris and they, like many others before and since, made their ocarinas in different sizes so that they could be played in ensembles. They invented the tuning plunger so that ocarinas could be tuned to play with other instruments.
The Donati system, and that developed by John Taylor, are now so common that their origins are all but forgotten, and their two fingering systems—the two rows of four fingerholes plus two thumbholes of the Italian style, and the four differently sized fingerholes of the English— are now found on serious instruments and on toys of all shapes and sizes worldwide. Both depend on the fact that it is the area of open hole that controls the pitch, and this is a factor that affects many other instruments, wind, string, and percussion (see the afterword for more detail on this).
For example, the area of their soundholes is important for the sound of violins, for it is this that tunes the resonance pitch of the body of air inside the box. It is also an important factor for the sound of Renaissance and Baroque lutes and guitars that have a pierced rose in their soundboard rather than the open hole we see in classical and folk guitars today. Lynda Sayce established that this was a major factor in the switch from single to triple roses in some models of theorbo as body shapes changed in the early seventeenth century: The greater area of the pierced holes in the rose complemented the shallower bowl of the new type of body and, crucially, also the higher basic tuning in comparison with the similarly sized bodies of the bass lutes. With both bowed and plucked instruments, the pitch of the air volume contained in the body, tuned by the area of open hole as with a vessel flute, is vital to their response in performance.
Clappers, Demons and Other Myths
