Clay-Wood-Winds
Robin L. Hodgkinson’s studio in Haydenville, Massachusetts, and the copy of his site the museum keeps.
A note from the museum
This page is the museum’s account of a website it has preserved. It is not by the maker, and nothing from the site is republished here.
Robin L. Hodgkinson has made wind instruments of clay since the 1970s, from a one-man studio called Clay-Wood-Winds in the village of Haydenville in western Massachusetts, in the foothills of the Berkshires, ten minutes from Northampton.
He made three things. Simple four-hole whistle ocarinas. Six-hole transverse flutes. And multichambered instruments of his own design, which he called Spirit Vessels — “harmonic sound sculptures”. He tuned them so beginners could manage them, and sold them to professionals and music teachers as well.
Before clay he worked in bamboo, acrylic tubing, metal tubing and lathe-turned hardwoods, and he wrote about why the material matters: bamboo “subtle and delicate, like an Indian raga”; wood “mellow, like a piece of Baroque music”. He became interested in clay at college, on being shown the whistles and flutes of pre-Columbian Central and South America.
For years he took the instruments up and down the East Coast — ten juried shows in a season, from Rhinebeck and Chautauqua to the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the National Flute Association Convention in Washington, and Paradise City in his own town. Alan Albright, writing in 1999, called him “‘THE’ ocarina man on the crafts circuit”.
What the museum holds
903 files, 40.3 MB.
| 702 | pages |
| 1 | pages transcribed to plain text |
| 29 | photographs and illustrations |
| 163 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
Saved from the Internet Archive in September 2026.
Part of this copy is not his. The domain lapsed and was taken over by a search-engine content farm, which published pieces with titles like “10 Facts You Didn’t Know About The Water Temple From Ocarina Of Time”. Those pages are in the copy because they were at the address. They are not Clay-Wood-Winds and are not presented as such.
Rights, and what is published
Nothing. He is living, and he has not been asked.
His contact page carries a postal address and a telephone number. They stay in the private copy and are not published, on the same principle applied to every living person here.
If this is your work, Mr Hodgkinson, and you would like it published here, kept privately, corrected, or deleted, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.