ClayZeness Whistleworks
What the museum holds of clayz.com, the Seattle ocarina site of Sandi and Richard Schmidt, and on what terms.
A note from the museum
This page records what the museum holds of a website that is no longer online, and what it may do with it. It is not by the people who made that site.
The museum’s account of the makers, with a chronology, is at ClayZeness Ocarinas.
ClayZeness Whistleworks was Sandi and Richard Schmidt, who made ocarinas in Seattle and sold them from what their site called a four-foot “Daytable” at Pike Place Market.
What the site held
Their website, clayz.com, described itself as “a continuing collaboration of Sandi’s and Richard’s endeavor to bring a little peace through music to the world.” The Internet Archive’s first capture of it is from December 1998. It was still offering ocarinas at ten to sixty dollars on December 12, 2019, which is the last capture of it as theirs. By January 30, 2020 the address returned “Domain Account Inactive” from Blarg.net, the Seattle provider that hosted it — seven weeks, across a year end, which is what a lapsed renewal looks like. Some time after that the domain itself went, and the address now serves a parking page.
The order of those two months is worth noticing. The website went dark between December 12 and January 30 — and on December 17, in between, she was firing her kiln. The site did not stop because she did.
It was not a catalog with some writing attached; it was a working shop’s website that had accumulated everything its owners cared about. Ocarinas for sale, from ten-dollar pendants to porcelain flutes. A songbook of tunes arranged for the four-hole ocarina, with fingering charts. Photographs of instruments they had made and of others they had collected. An essay on clay musical instruments. A page for the Ocarinaclub mailing list, which they founded in February 1999. And a long run of correspondence — with Baz Jennings in England, with the flute players of Usenet, with Alan Albright, who had taught Sandi and whom they spent years trying to find again.
Richard also kept a mirror of Baz Jennings and John Taylor’s Ocarina Originators site after Baz’s death, at Baz’s request. That story is told with Baz’s history of the ocarina.
What the museum holds
Published here:
- The Sounds of Ceramics — Richard’s essay for the 1987 exhibition From Mud to Music, on why instruments of clay sound as they do.
- The Taylor/Jennings Connection — how the Schmidts learned in 1998 whose four-hole system they had been using.
Held privately, as provenance rather than for publication: a copy of the site as the Internet Archive recorded it, kept so that what was on clayz.com does not depend on any one archive staying up. It is one of several such copies.
What the Archive holds. Captures run from December 1998 to 2026, across about 1,050 separate days, covering some 1,150 distinct addresses on the site — though the site itself was gone in January 2020, and everything captured after that is the hosting notice and then the parking page that replaced it.
What the museum has taken from that. Assembled from the captures that carried real content:
435 files, 12.4 MB.
| 143 | pages |
| 1 | plain-text file from the site |
| 147 | photographs and illustrations |
| 27 | sound recordings |
| 1 | video clip |
| 115 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
The recordings are the part least likely to survive anywhere else: short demonstrations of single tunes — Twinkle, Sakura, Camptown Races, Arirang — attached to the pages of their own songbook. The site does not say who is playing.
What the museum holds back, and why
Most of clayz.com is not the museum’s to republish, and saying so is part of the record.
The songbook is the largest part of the site and the least publishable: the arrangements are for songs by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Gershwin, none of which the Schmidts could license. Much of the rest is correspondence, and while Sandi’s and Richard’s own words are covered by her permission, the people writing back are not — a single page may carry half a dozen voices. The site’s own photograph gallery notes that some images were “borrowed” with attribution unknown. And the catalog, order forms and price lists belong to a business that has closed; reproducing them as though they were live would mislead.
What remains, and what the museum takes, is the writing that is plainly the Schmidts’ own.
Rights, and what is published
Sandi Schmidt gave permission in September 2026 for articles from clayz.com to be preserved here, reformatted but verbatim, with any corrections shown in a note. That permission covers her and Richard’s own work. It does not extend to the words of other people quoted on their site, nor to the Ocarina Originators mirror, which was never theirs to give.