Alan Albright

The San Francisco maker of wooden double ocarinas, what the museum holds of his writing, and the four articles published from it with his permission.

A note from the museum

Alan Albright is living, and everything published here is published with his permission — given for the correspondence when it was written, and extended on September 13, 2026 to “any way you see fit”.

Alan Albright made wooden ocarinas in San Francisco. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds four of them, given by him in 1981, and American Musical Instruments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1985) describes him as one of the craftspeople behind the instrument’s late-century revival.

He matters to this museum out of proportion to the size of the holding, because he keeps turning up at the root of other people’s work. Charlie Hind’s first wooden ocarinas were made after his employer came back from a Florida show in 1981 with an Albright double. Sandi Schmidt was taught by him. He wrote to her in August 1983 about window size against interior volume. He was still answering questions by email in 2023. Two American making traditions are traced back to him here by entirely separate routes.

What the museum holds

9 files, 480.5 KB.

6	pages
2	photographs and illustrations
1	email message

Six of those pages are “Dance to the Music of the Ocarina, Wilhemina”, his own account of how the wooden double came about, written as a series of emails in 1999. The rest is one message he sent the museum in 2019, with its photographs.

How the memoir survived is worth setting out, because no single copy of it was safe. Alan wrote it as email. Baz Jennings published it across six pages on the Ocarina Originators site at ocarina.demon.co.uk. Richard Schmidt of ClayZeness mirrored that whole site at Baz’s request, so a second copy stood at clayz.com. Then Baz died in 2004, Richard in 2013, clayz.com lapsed, and both sites went. What the museum has came back out of the Internet Archive, and a second capture of the first page survives inside the ClayZ mirror of the Originators site.

Three custodians, none of them the author, and the text is still here. That is the argument for this whole section of the museum, made by one document.

What is published

All four parts were written by the museum, from his words:

• Part 1 — what the Metropolitan Museum records about the 1981 gift, and the curriculum vitae he circulated in 1995.
• Part 2 — the memoir itself, reproduced as written.
• Part 3 — a double alto bought on eBay in 2019, and what it showed.
• Part 4 — a second instrument, and his account of who took over making them and of the men who sold him his wood.

His postal address and his email address were in the 1995 curriculum vitae. Both were removed before publication, and the removal is declared on the page rather than made silently. They are not published here and will not be.

This holding sits among the sites and papers the museum has copied.