The US Army Issued Ocarinas to Soldiers in World War II

(flutetunes.com)

21 points | by tomcam 2 days ago

6 comments

  • dofm 1 hour ago

      Carter?
      "Yes sir?"
      What is it, Carter?
      "An ocarina, sir"
      Bring it up here!
    
    I've had a really nice, small "English four-hole" unglazed terracotta pendant ocarina since I was a kid. They are actually really fun to play and very visceral, in a sense; the way you can get a chromatic scale from only four hole sizes combinatorially is intellectually satisfying and weirdly easy to learn.

    It came with some sheet music that shows each note as a box with four dots in it that can be shown as either open or closed:

    https://ocarinasongbook.com/fingering-charts/four-hole/

    It sounds unusually sophisticated — perhaps even better after forty-plus years -- and it's actually a relatively new design. The ocarina is ancient but the four hole chromatic design dates from the 1960s, so it's newer than those Gretsch ocarinas in the article.

    You can get them in all sorts of shapes and sizes -- Thomann sell hand-painted clay 4H ocarinas in the shapes of strawberries and clownfish.

    I wish we'd been taught to play these in school instead of with those Aulos descant recorders that everyone in British schools, particularly teachers I imagine, grew to hate.

  • jhbadger 1 hour ago
    The US military thought a lot about how to entertain its soldiers because there was a lot of downtime during a war and most of them were draftees who didn't necessarily want to be there, Another thing they did was publish pocket paperback editions of books back when paperbacks were less common.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Editions

    • throw93949449 1 hour ago
      > most of them were draftees who didn't necessarily want to be there

      It is called forced labour or slavery.

      • multjoy 1 hour ago
        It wasn’t slavery as they were paid and could be expected to be discharged at the cessation of hostilities.

        Conscription is as old as society itself.

        • freedomben 47 minutes ago
          You're both right. We don't want to water down the term "slavery" by using it for draftees, but it is a form of temporary slavery. Slave's have always been "paid" in the form of room and board (however meager), but it's still slavery.
        • throe94944i 53 minutes ago
          Yeah, they were paid!! Plastic ocarinas!
      • dctoedt 41 minutes ago
        > It is called forced labour or slavery.

        In war, people who tolerate military conscription and discipline will conquer those who're slaves to pigheaded "you're not the boss of ME!" individualism.

        It'd be nice if humans would voluntarily abandon war someday. But a corollary of the First Commandment is to face facts.

        • cucumber3732842 1 minute ago
          That doesn't make it not forced though.

          Most of this sub thread people who are unwilling to say "yeah it's forced labor and that's fine considering the details" doing mental gymnastics to make it not forced.

  • brudgers 17 hours ago
    That explains the Joey's ocarina in the movie Stalag 17.
  • snorkel 1 hour ago
    Back in the day in elementary school we were each issued a tonette
  • microgpt 24 minutes ago
    [dead]