Research

The museum’s research in one place: the chronologies, the preserved websites, the patent register, the source surveys, and what is being worked on now.

First published

October 4, 2026

Research and drafting were done with help from Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant.

The catalog, the brands, and the group photos show the collection — the instruments themselves. This page gathers the record built around them: who made ocarinas, where, when, and how the museum knows.

Published

Chronologies — dated accounts of makers, workshops, and brands, with a source named on every line. Where sources disagree, the disagreement is recorded rather than settled.

Preserved Websites — makers’ sites that have gone offline, copied before they vanished, each with a page saying exactly what the museum holds and on what terms. Preserving a site and publishing it are different acts, and the museum does the first without the second until the owner says yes.

Patents — a register of ocarina patents across six countries and two centuries, most of them held as documents and read, with the passages that matter quoted so a reader can check the register against the page.

The source surveys — what one class of document, read end to end, says about the instrument:

Music Trades Review, 1877–1894 — a London trade monthly that printed the patent lists in full, two dealers at war over whose ocarina was the original, and the end of the craze.
Trade Catalogs, 1878–1930 — wholesalers and mail-order houses, and what their pages prove about prices, sizes, and who was named as maker.

Being worked on

Research here moves at the speed of its sources, so this list is a statement of direction, not a schedule. Some of it has been in progress for weeks, and some may take years to complete.

Budrio — the makers from Giuseppe Donati, who invented the modern ocarina there in 1853, to Fabio Menaglio, who makes ocarinas in Budrio today. The museum’s most-cited subject, being assembled into a dated account.
The Japanese makers’ lineage — who learned from whom, from the makers’ own published biographies. Japan has the deepest living ocarina tradition and the least of it is written down in English.
Exhibition catalogs, 1869–1893 — the companion to the trade-catalogs survey, drafted and in review.
Old Glory, Gretsch, and Waterbury — the American factory brands. Working chronologies exist for all three; Old Glory now has the company’s own 1939 instruction booklet read against its price list.
How makers numbered their ocarinas — Roman numerals in an 1880s tutor, the Viennese trade runs, numbers cast into metal in a 1901 French patent. The documents are gathered; the account is not yet written.
The ocarina in the Italian press, 1860–1930 — trade statistics, exposition reports, and a musicians’ dictionary, from a sweep of digitized Italian periodicals in October 2026.

If one of these subjects is yours — your workshop, your family’s maker, your town — the museum would rather hear from you before it publishes than after: theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.

How the museum works

What the museum collects, what it never publishes, how it treats other people’s work, and what it does about its own mistakes are set out on the mission and policies page.