The Sounds of Ceramics
Richard Schmidt on why instruments of clay sound as they do, written for a 1987 national survey exhibition of ceramic musical instruments.
Written by Richard Schmidt of Clayzeness Whistleworks for the exhibit programme of From Mud to Music, 1987, and published years afterwards on Clayzeness Ocarinas (clayz.com), the site he ran with Sandi Schmidt in Seattle. That site is no longer online; this copy is preserved here from the Internet Archive, with Sandi Schmidt’s permission.
The sounds of peace and serenity do not change. Those sounds are music. Musical sounds are imitative of the natural sounds we learned in our collective innocence ancient years ago. The age of humans makes us truly vessels of antiquity and it is the ages this vessel holds that echoes and is touched so deeply by the music and the sounds that make it up. From the lowest low attained when the great bass stops are pulled on a giant pipe organ to the highest trill of the tiniest whistle; from the gentle, earthy thump of the wooden bongo drum to the floor shaking resonance of a concert tippany; from the innocent and natural plunk of a kalimba to the formal and knowing sound of a full-sized concert harp, sounds of music are many and varied and all can be traced to sounds of nature, sounds of our ancient Earth. It is with bits of that earth that humans have thrown, pinched, pressed, poured and otherwise built musical instruments for eons. Although all musical instruments can be traced to ancient times, it is those of clay that have most direct and basic roots to antiquity.
Ceramic musical instruments are made with a variety of techniques that remain basic. The sounds they produce remain rooted and unchanging. The surface may catch our eye at first, or perhaps the shape, but the true intrigue is the void they encompass, for it is the void within the vessel that gives the sound of all history.
Although clay has been used to make bells, rattles, drums, horns and even stringed instruments, most ceramic musical instruments are whistles (simply put). In their basic form, their origins date to stone age times, some of the earliest being tens of thousands of years old found in Central Africa. For centuries, they have been an important part of the global music culture, called “hsuan” in China, in France a “cou cou”, and to Italy we trace the word “Ocarina” (sweet little goose), now part of the international vernacular. The pitch of the sound produced in a vessel flute varies with the size, from very small whistles that produce penetrating bird-like sounds to larger vessels with soft and mellow, deep pitched sounds. The number and sizes of the tone holes determine scaling which can range from a few little notes to a nearly two octave range. Multiple chambers can produce beautiful harmonics making the musical possibilities nearly limitless. Further explanation could be made in relation to physics and high trigonometry, but perhaps these two quotes will suffice.
— R. Schmidt, as published in the exhibit program for “From Mud To Music”, 1987
The greatest thing about the whistle flute is that it plays the notes that don’t exist, that is, the cracks between the keys and even the cracks between the cracks.
— Cathal McConnell (Boys Of The Lough)
To impress those high-tech computer types, tell them what an Ocarina really is: “an animal-activated-solid-state-multi-frequency-sound-synthesizer.”
— George Kelischek (master violin builder)
A note on the text
Richard’s wording stands as he wrote it, including “tippany” for timpani and “hsuan” for the Chinese xun. The closing quotation mark on George Kelischek’s line was missing in the original and has been supplied.
On the original page this essay was followed by a set of dictionary definitions which the Schmidts themselves headed “Definitions We ‘Borrowed’”. Those are other people’s words rather than theirs to pass on, and are not reproduced here.
If you wrote this, or were interviewed in it, and would like it changed or removed, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.