Starting in 2021 discussions between me and several other makers on the TON (The Ocarina Network) forums and the three main ocarina groups on Facebook (TON, Ocarina Makers, and Global Ocarina Community) have led me to want to form a commission to set standards for the ocarina. In the current state of affairs there is a great deal about the ocarina that is inconsistent. There are few standards that are maintained in the written sheet music, there is no standards naming convention that is held between makers and there is no well defined sense of how to classify and recommend different types of ocarinas. This goal of this commission is to create standards that many contributing members of the ocarina community agree to that can in hopes be more widely adopted and used to make it easier to understand, read sheet music for, and compose for the ocarina.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of issues with the ocarina I have identified.

There are many questions we should be asking about setting up recommendations for such things as the following- How are composers to know what range the instrument should be expected to have?
How well should an ocarina be expected to work?
Should certain ocarinas be recommended over others?

Currently there is little standardization for what the naming convention for an ocarina is. When a composition calls for a tenor ocarina what could they mean? What about a soprano? what about a contrabass? In the current state of affairs there are more then one pitch class of instrument that these terms refer to. This should be cleaned up and standardized for the benefit of both players and composers. It would be greatly helpful to make these much tighter categorizes so that whenever any one kind of instrument is asked for it is understood to as close of a margin as possible.

Currently there is not enough standardization for what ocarina sheet music should look like.
Where do we define should be the position of the tonic? Below the staff or in the staff?
Should we consider the ocarina to be a transposing instrument? What are the drawbacks to it being read at pitch vs transposed?

Many other instrument communities have well defined libraries of compositions on the instrument. One such community is the recorder community with various recorder societies maintaining lists of original compositions for the instrument that can easily be found and searched by players of the instrument. This is to great advantage in the community because it allows for composers to be found by players and more works to be performed. Is someone owns an obscure type of recorder, say a gerklein recorder, they are easily able to find resources for original compositions and arrangements to play on the instrument. Such societies and libraries should also exist for the ocarina.

Here is a rough outline of proposed solutions that this commission should attempt to agree on. This of course is not an exhaustive list and hopefully more topics will become apparent over time. I will provide an outline of the issues I've discussed so far, and separately I will include this outline with the solutions I myself propose.

This includes 10 hole, 11, 12 and 13 hole ocarinas. I consider all of these instruments to be in the same class as the majority of the fingering is the same with different extents of extended range.
Should these instruments be organized by tonic?
Is a class system divided two to an octave like other instrument families the best choice?

Ideally the names should match the above ocarina class as well.

Should these instruments also be sorted the same as the above classes?
Should the chamber that plays the lowest tonic be considered or should the upper chambers be taken into consideration?

Where do we define should be the position of the tonic? Below the staff or in the staff?

Should we recommend that sheet music is transposed (always showing the tonic note as written C on the sheet music)?

Should we make a set of sheet music markings for unique techniques only the ocarina can do?
What about microtonal techniques?

The commission should seek out to make a compositional guide for a composers who are not yet familiar with the instrument. it is unreasonable to expect that composers will sort out the information from the ocarina community and we should instead make a guide that defines the instrument in terms that they will understand from the perspective of contemporary music.

No such thing as paying louder then fuerte on the ocarina (mf is pretty much the loudest it can play in tune as well)

should we recommend 12 hole and doubles as the choice models for professional playing?

Which models can a composer reasonably expect a player to show up with?

What kinds of music can be played on an ocarina?

Think of this like forming a centralized ocarina authority and forming a website where the composition guides, recommendations, and sheet music can be kept.

Ideally this would be a spreadsheet or table with the instruments called for as different cells that can be sorted for convenience. There can also be a set of links to works and to authors.

This is a much more complicated task as there vast majority of music for the ocarina is arrangements. There are additional issues with sorting authorship and defining the instruments called for in this category as much of the tablature does not define the exact instrument intended. This also includes a great deal of tablature for the ocarina that is very basic in nature and act more like sketches of musical works then like fully fledged sheet music. The tablature work may need to be sorted separately then sheet music arrangements for the ocarina.