Ocarinamusic — Hans Rotter’s workshop, Austria
Hans Rotter’s ceramic ocarina workshop in Austria, its three web addresses, and the copy the museum keeps of the earliest of them.
A note from the museum
This page is the museum’s account of a website it has preserved. It is not by the people who made it, and nothing from the site is republished here.
This page has been corrected. It previously described this site as English and its maker as unknown. Both were wrong, and the correction is set out below.
ocarina-workshop.com was Austrian, and the site says so in a line the museum had not read: its own page description, on every page, reads “Handgefertigte Keramik-Ocarinas aus der Werkstatt Hans Rotter in Österreich” — handmade ceramic ocarinas from the workshop of Hans Rotter in Austria.
It ran in German and English from the same frameset, with a flag on the front page for each, and its header carried two addresses side by side: ocarina-workshop.com and www.ocarina.de. They were one workshop with two doors, not two sites.
What it sold, in its own English: ocarinas in two fingering systems — “one is with full chromatic scale and the other one is with sixtone scale (it is easier to learn)” — with a songbook and instructions for each, “made in many sizes and pitches ranging from the tiny piccolo to the huge bass”. Alongside those were animal ocarinas “especially popular for children”, in a seven-hole scale or a simple four-hole pentatonic. Every instrument, it says, was hand made and electronically tuned.
The correction
This page used to say that ocarina-workshop.com was one end of the English school-ocarina thread, that its maker was unknown, and that a German site, ocarina.de, “has not yet been copied, and should be”. Every part of that was wrong:
- The site is Austrian, not English. The confusion is an easy one and worth naming, because anyone else researching this will hit it: Ocarina Workshop Limited of Kettering, Northamptonshire — the English firm behind the four-hole plastic school ocarina, at ocarina.co.uk — is a different company with no connection to this site beyond two shared words.
- The maker is not unknown. He is named in the site’s own metadata.
- ocarina.de did not need copying separately. It is this workshop’s other address — and, as it turns out, the one constant across all of them. See below.
The museum publishes its mistakes rather than quietly overwriting them, and this one is a good example of the commonest way to get a small site wrong: reading the language of the interface instead of the language of the page.
Three addresses, one workshop
The brand is Ocarinamusic, and the workshop has used three web addresses. They are not three sites, and the order matters:
| ocarina-workshop.com | The old site. This is what the museum holds. Its own page counter runs “seit Juni 1999”, and the Internet Archive’s captures of it run from February 2001 to November 2007. |
| ocarinamusic.com | The later site, carrying the brand name. The Archive holds captures from November 2002 to December 2024 — appearing while the old address was still up, and outlasting it by seventeen years. |
| ocarina.de | The constant. It is the address that has been in use throughout, and it is what links the other two: the old site’s own header prints it beside ocarina-workshop.com, and it later stood beside ocarinamusic.com in the same way. It is still live today. |
So the shape is not a workshop that moved once. It is a workshop that has always answered to ocarina.de, with a second, more descriptive address alongside it that changed — first ocarina-workshop.com, later ocarinamusic.com.
The museum holds only the first of the three, and only the part of it the Internet Archive happened to capture. Nothing from the ocarinamusic.com years is held here, which is seventeen of the workshop’s twenty-five years online.
The workshop, and the collection
The Rotter name is already in this museum. Two of the group photographs held here show Rotter instruments, and one records “the flower sign of Karin Rotter” on a four-hole Tierokarina. The connection between those instruments and this site had not been made until now.
ocarina.de is still trading. It is now an Austrian music house selling ocarinas through a large retailer rather than a workshop selling its own, and what happened in between — whether the workshop passed within the family, and when it stopped making its own instruments — is not established here and should not be guessed at.
What the museum holds
47 files, 210.3 KB.
| 25 | pages |
| 4 | photographs and illustrations |
| 17 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
Saved from the Internet Archive in September 2026. It is a small copy: a frameset, a gallery, and the German and English versions of a handful of pages. Enough to identify the workshop, not enough to write its history from.
Rights, and what is published
Nothing.
Hans Rotter is living, and has not yet been asked. Preserving something and publishing it are different acts, and the museum will do the first without the second.
What the museum holds is the early site, at an address that has since gone. The workshop’s surviving address is ocarina.de, which is not copied here.
If any of this is yours, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.
ocarina.de — still there · ocarina-workshop.com in the Internet Archive