Christmas Nose Flute Cookies!

Two years ago, I made the Chocorina, and I thought this Christmas was the right time to make another experiment: the Nose Flute Cookie!

First I made some dough, a mostly classic one. The thing is that I wanted the cookies to be rather thin but resist the handling. So, I chose buckwheat flour and lessened a bit the butter portion. For 15 cookies, I used:

1½ cup (190g) buckwheat flour
¼ cup (55g) butter
¼ cup (85g) honey
¼ cup (55g) brown sugar (real one:)
1 egg
1 teasp. cinnamon
1 teasp. ginger
a pinch of nutmeg, powdered clove, salt.

I mixed the flour and the spices in a bowl. In another one, I kneaded sugar and butter, added honey, added the egg. Then I poured this in that, kneaded, and let this dark dough in the fridge for a 24 hours rest.

1 - The Shields

The next day, the real work began... I flattened to ±3mm a part of the dough on a silicone pad, and cut circles (the nose flute shield) and the rectangular mouth holes, following the plastic template I made (see at the bottom of this post).

With my scalpel, I cut the bevel of the labium. Better to be the most precise in this task, so I also use the help of a metal ruler to get a nice surface and edge.



I needed to bake the shields as curved tiles, so I carefully placed them over the rolling pin, bevel on the top. I shimed the rolling pin as I could in a dish, in order to avoid it to do what it does the best: to roll:). The oven set at 350°F (180°C), I let the cookies 15 minutes (this time really depends on the thickness: when they begin to turn brown, it's time to get them out).

I got 3 nice cookies, and did the whole operation 4 more times, in order to get 15 baked shields. I corrected the little imperfections with the scalpel then.

2 - The Airways

Next task was to make the dough bridges that would become the airways. Same thing, I flattened the dough, but this time I did it even thinner (±2.5 mm). Again, I used the second part of my plastic template, placed the cuts on the rolling pin and baked them (±10 min).

3 - Assembling

For the assembling, I made a good bunch of Royal Icing (I used the rest in the last step). For that, I took:

1¾ cup (230g) icing sugar
1 egg white
½ lemon juice

Then, I put some of my royal glue on the edge of the airways, and placed them into the shields, took a great care in aligning the bottom edge of the airways with the top edge of the mouth hole, and let a little gap betwen them (±1.5 mm). I let what we now can call nose flutes dry for half an hour.

4 - Icing

For the coating, I used the rest of my Royal Icing, that I separated in 5 parts. I added some tiny drops of natural food colorants to get 5 pastel colors. I coated the flutes with a paintbrush, leaving the "technical part" (the zone under the mouth hole) free of icing, to keep a nice air flow. Again, I let dry a good half of an hour.

5 - Christmas Nose Flute Cookies!

The result was 15 nice Christmas Nose Flute Cookies, 3 of each colour!

Here are some details:



And some pictures of the series:



Well, do they play? I must admit that not all of them are playable. I didn't try all of them, because I intend to offer some, but I tested 7 of them, and 4 were playable. More or less, several rather nicely, other squeaking:)

So, the last question is: are they tasty? Well, just take a look at this video!:

6 - Template

The template is more or less the same than the Wallet Instant Nose Flute v.1 one, excepted for the labium and the airway. Indeed, you can see that the lateral edges are curved now.



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Yamaneko-tei, the Nose Flute Shop!

Is Japan a paradise for nose flute lovers? The answer is obvious : many players, clubs which organize nose flute events and parties, gifted crafstmen producing wooden or ceramics instruments, and even experimenters who search and invent new nose flute systems... But that's not all, folks, there is also a nose flute shop!



Mr. Mitsuya Toyao is the manager of a beautiful and welcoming little shop in Odai-Cho, in the Mie prefecture. The store is called Yamaneko-tei (やまねこ亭) which means something like the « Mountain Cat Pavillion » or the « Lynx Kiosk ». Its name was chosen to celebrate the freedom in the mountains. The place looks very cosy and welcoming, with wooden table and chairs for the visitors, a furnace in the corner, with a kettle ready for tea time.



More, two moustachioed inhabitants keep the place: Orihime (おりひめ) — the weaver celebrated at Tanabata festival (the Vega star) and Yume (ゆめ) — « Dream », both abandoned female cats who found a new home at Mitsuya Toyao's.



The shop was primarily dedicated to selling Japanese hair ornaments, but for some months, it has become the only "brick'n'mortar" shop where to find a bunch of unique nose flutes by different craftsmen. On the shelves, you can find instruments by Akio Takamura and Go Nagayama, Susumu Yasuda, Yoshihiro Sawada (RON) among many other that I don't know, notably the maker of the "Shōzan kama" ones, cream and grey striped clay, the craftsman who made the new wooden models made in cypress, etc. You even can find some Bocarinas!


And have a look to the shelves!:



I ordered some nose flutes from Yamaneko-tei (check their review in a later post...), and Mr. Toyao is very kind and generous. I used Google translate to communicate, and I paid by bank transfer to Japan. A bit slow, but no problems, and Mr. Toyao didn't wait for the payment to send the flutes, so I received them in some 10 days.

So, you can order nose flutes from the shop, by contacting Mr. Toyao through his Facebook page, or if you are in the area, it's certainly worth visiting the shop:

Yamaneko-tei - やまねこ亭
TOYAO Mitsuya
Sawara 141-2, Odai-cho
Mie Prefecture Multigenki
519-2404
Japan

Tel: 090-6087-0654

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L. Mozart (well, no) Toy Symphony

Our friend Herman Vandecauter just released a new video in which he plays the Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony (Kindersinfonie). In fact, « Recent research on a newly found manuscript suggests the Austrian benedictine monk Edmund Angerer (1740–1794) to be the author. » (wiki).
In this video, Herman made a nice arrangement for tenor ukulele, nose flute, canary whistle, chinese xu, tambourine and water whistle!

Topps Nose Flute (Humanatone)

Two years and a half after having discovered its existence, we finally found and got one: the rare Topps Nose Flute, with its great packaging!



We will not repeat what we already wrote there about the Topps company and cheap toys. Let just say — contrarywise to what we stated in 2012 — that this flute is a *real* Humanatone, branded by Gretsch, and not a Topps dedicated version Humanatone. It dates of the second half of the 1960s.

Mine is a beautiful monochromatic mid-blue sample, and is similar at any point to the regular Gretsch Humies that were sold in cardboard boxes. I carefully removed the stapples to take pictures, and then repacked this collector for another long sleep.

As we said, the difference lays in the great packaging offered to the Topps flute. The young player looks totally enchanted by the whistlings he produces, the colors are rather flashy, and the typographics are funny.



A user manual is included with the Humanatone, with no particular surprise, but showing a strip of three boxes, drawn like a triptych by Roy Lichtenstein :)



A good addition in the collection!

Yoshihiro Sawada's new templates

Inspired by our flat nose flute, Mr. Yoshihiro Sawada (aka RON) (check this post ) has solved the « fixing the airway to the body » problem in a very elegant way: cutting two slits in the main shield in order to insert the two ends of a prolongated airway. Very clever!!

Dadaistic Funeral March and Christmas Song

"Marschner Jürgen" aka Jogi - is a multi talented and very creative musician from Berlin. Jogi composes and plays what I dare to call a very typical Berliner music, kind of very creative light-electronic-dadaistic melodies with a serious/dramatic counterpoint (low percussions or a bass distorted voice...). He plays the out-of-tune ukulele as well as Casio keyboards, samplepad, percussions, and... Nasenflöte!

Here is the Nosepipe-Ukulele Funeral March he sent me the link to. I couldn't resist laughing before his mastering of the delicate shifts to the out-of-tune world. Great work!



Jogi seems to have been very inspired by Christmas this last week, and produced no less than four videos on the theme. « I missed a Noseflute Christmas Song in the archive », he wrote me, and added in the video description « I think it's worldwide the first Nosepipe Christmas Song ». Well, there already were (check our here for instance), but this one is my prefered one:



There are many other little treasures that you should watch and listen to on Marschner Jürgen Youtube channel.

The Pop-up Nose Flute : Major Improvement on the WINF!

The Wallet Instant Nose Flute (WINF) encountered a nice critical success, but some readers asked me OK, but why don't you glue the 2 parts together? Well, for sure I tried sereval ways to glue the small piece to the big one, for more comfort in the handling. The problem was kind of structural: when glued, the air exit bulged too much to create a very thin air flow. The two only obvious ways to act upon this problem would have been 1) either to make a much less broad air exit (bad solution: the flute wouldn't whistle anymore) or 2) not to bulge the nose flute itself so much (bad solution too: it has to be bent a lot in order to provide hermeticity)



But... I found a solution: make a double air exit, in order to flatten its two openings, and provide the required very thin air flow.

For that, I added a little flap on the small piece, folded it (the plastic quality has to stand with repeated foldings). This little flap is glued above the mouth hole: it keeps the airway cover at the right place and also saves the "flatability" of the nose flute.



For the rest, nothing hs changed, but it is easier now to show how this pop-up nose flute (2.5D!) works:



Here is the new template:



And the video!:



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A Reader tests the Wallet Instant Nose Flute

A reader of this blog — our friend UkeVal/LuthVal — has decided to test the Wallet Instant Nose flute, and succeeded well! I guess he used a rather thin plastic and cut a fipple a bit to high ([edit: template has been corrected] on my template, the "7 mm" refers to the height *including* the bevel. The hole itself is only 5 or 6 mm high). So, his sound is a bit too much windy. But UkeVal got the move and sound! Congratulations!



And his second test, with another WINF made with a bevel and a narrower mouth hole:

The Wallet Instant Nose Flute

It is sometimes pretty annoying to carry a nose flute in your pocket, particularly if you wear an elegant suit and don't want to get your pockets deformed. You would need a flat nose flute! Here is one, which is so simple to make that it could have been named the Poor Man's Nose Flute. Well, I chose to call it, contrarywise, the Wallet Instant Nose Flute.

I took a piece of soft plastic coming from a ring binder cover, and cut 2 parts: a circular one and a trapezoid one. Then, I made a rectangular cut in the round piece, and made a bevel on its lower edge, as a fipple.

Here is the template of the 2 pieces I cut:



So, I got two plastic parts and... and that's all. No glue, no adhesive tape, nothing, and the Wallet Instant Nose Flute is ready! You don't believe me? Just watch the video below.



You just have to place the smallest part (the back side of the airway) over the circular piece and, holding the ensemble like on the picture above, put your nose at the right place. There is a little knack to get not to move the small piece away from the fipple, but when you have gotten it, every attempt is a success.

Well, I deliberately chose a translucent plastic because I'm a freak, but you're not obliged to show off your nostrils like I do :)



And now, the video, for your greatest pleasure: