mission.japan

Friday night is another Music Cafe, and as usual I will be working the tables. This time, however, I plan on making my Cafe debut on the ocarina, which I picked up last month after buying a handmade Alto C at a store Yukiko introduced me to in Kurashiki.

Appearance-wise it’s a curious instrument—very minimal and compact. The fingerings for the key of C are very natural and easy to pick up. Other keys like D, A, and B flat are not too hard—starting with the E above the lowest C you can get all of the sharps/flats you need by covering the same hole on the right hand. Tone-wise it’s a very clean sound, a bit more so than a whistle I think, but the high C and above is still a bit airy. The range, in case you’re wondering, is a restricting but enjoyable octave-and-a-half or so, from the A below middle C to the F in the second octave up.

The most challenging thing so far is finding the right air pressure for each note. The ocarina is uniquely sensitive to the speed of incoming air, so you can often bend a note half a step in either direction. This means you can get a vibrato or other accentuating marks with little effort, but it also means it’s difficult to stay in tune. In general the higher the note the harder you have to blow, but with my particular ocarina there are some exceptions, like the low D or the high C, which need a softer touch to hit the right frequency.

As far as music goes, a lot of the sheet music we have for worship songs at the church works pretty well. For the Cafe I’d like to play “Ashokan Farewell” and “chiisana inori”, the latter being a Japanese song in the key of A major that has a very intriguing melody. On the side I’ll figure out some melodies from memory, often working with the church piano first to get the right notes. Last night at Tsutaya I picked up the soundtrack to “taiyou no uta”—a Friday-night drama that ended its twelwe-episode run last week—and I’m looking forward to seeing how some of those melodies sound on the ocarina.

So far it’s been a very interesting venture. I can usually set aside 30 minutes a day for practice, and improvement has been surprisingly noticeable (although since I started from scratch that’s probably not unusual). The goal right now is to get to the point where I can ad lib with Matt or someone else given a key to work with. That might take a while, but getting there should be fun.