Hamlett Ocarinas
What the museum holds of hamlettocarinas.com, and the permission Richard Hamlett gave for it in September 2026.
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 maker, and nothing from the site is republished here.
The museum’s account of his work, with a chronology, is at Richard Hamlett.
Richard Hamlett made ocarinas one at a time, to order, and sold them from hamlettocarinas.com. He was explicit that it was not a trade: “This is not a business, it’s a passion. I don’t make ocarinas to pay the bills.”
What the site held
A made-to-order shop, run on Joomla from 2013, for Asian-style transverse ocarinas: “I personally make all of the ocarinas that appear on this site, one at a time… I make each ocarina as it is ordered.” No stock was held.
By 2018 the range ran to at least nine models — 12-hole Soprano F, 11-hole Soprano E♭, 11-hole Soprano D, 11-hole and 12-hole Alto C, 11-hole Alto B♭, 11-hole Alto G, 11-hole Alto F — each with its own fingering chart, and a double Alto C chart besides.
It also carried sheet music he had prepared himself — How Great Thou Art, What a Wonderful World, and a full score with ocarina parts for Yuu’s Theme from Noein — and lessons by Cris Gale, “the incomparable Ocarina Diva”.
The last announcement on it is dated February 2018. A forum thread afterwards asks “Hamlett Ocarinas, where did you go?” and does not get an answer.
What the museum holds
700 files, 16.7 MB.
| 252 | pages |
| 105 | photographs and illustrations |
| 1 | video clip |
| 26 | PDF documents |
| 214 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
Saved from the Internet Archive in September 2026; its captures run from 2013 to 2025 across about 230 days — though his own pages stop being updated after February 2018 and the last years of that span are largely spam. The site was built on a shop platform, so most of its addresses are query strings rather than files, and the copy reflects that — a good deal of it is the furniture of an online shop.
The thirteen PDFs are the part worth singling out. Documents of this kind on a maker’s site are fingering charts and instructions: the things a buyer was meant to keep and nobody thinks to archive.
What the museum holds back, and why
130 of the files are not his. By December 2024 the domain was serving directories of Chinese betting spam — kyguanwangmanbetx/, pages of machinery marketing copy in Chinese — alongside his own pages rather than in place of them, which points to a compromised Joomla installation rather than a domain that changed hands. Those pages are in the museum’s copy because they were at the address when it was mirrored. They are not his, and the only thing separating them from his work is the capture date, which is what MANIFEST.tsv is for.
The interview is the pointed case, and the order of events is the wrong way round. The museum already publishes an interview he gave to The Ocarina Repository in July 2013. It went up under the only terms available at the time: the museum had no way to reach Cambell Baxter, who ran the Repository and made the interview, so the page names him, links the original, and invites its own removal. Baxter was written to on September 28, 2026 — by a route Hamlett himself supplied — and has not yet answered.
But the answers in that interview are Richard Hamlett’s. He is a second rights holder in it, and he was reachable when Baxter was not. Asking him would turn one of those judgment calls into actual consent. He was written to on September 20, 2026 and answered the same day, giving the museum permission for his own part of it. Baxter’s half — the questions, and the making of the interview — is still not his to grant, so that part stands where it stood.
Rights, and what is published
Richard Hamlett gave the museum permission by Facebook message on September 20, 2026. Nothing from the site is published yet; what is published from it will be published under that permission, and anything he later wants corrected or removed is corrected or removed on his word.
Two things that permission does not cover. The interview is a second person’s work as well as his — Cambell Baxter asked the questions and made it — so the interview page stays on credit-and-invitation until Baxter answers the letter sent to him on September 28, 2026. And the spam directories that appeared on the domain after December 2024 are not Hamlett’s work, are covered by nothing, and stay separated by capture date.