Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day falls on 31 July every year, and it asks one question: what else is out there? Nobody knows who started it. No founder, sponsor or first observance is on record. The idea has been picked up anyway by orchestras, libraries and music schools, who use the date to put a theremin, an alphorn or a hurdy-gurdy in front of people who have only ever handled a guitar.

What Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day is

Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day is an unofficial observance held on 31 July. Its subject is not music in general but the instruments that sit outside the standard kit — the ones a school orchestra does not own, a high street shop does not stock, and most listeners could not name if they heard one. The premise is that the violin, the guitar and the piano are three answers to the question of how to make a sound, and that there are several thousand others.

There is no organisation behind the day, no theme for the year and no register of events. What there is instead is a date that a surprising number of institutions have quietly adopted. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has written about it. Public libraries schedule listening sessions around it. Music schools use it as a hook for open days. That is roughly the whole apparatus, and for a day whose only instruction is to go and listen to something unfamiliar, it is enough.

What is actually known about where the day came from

The honest answer is that nobody has established it. The calendar sites that list the day say so themselves: one states outright that it has no clear origin story and no known creator, another that we are simply unsure who created it. No founder has claimed it, no organisation sponsors it, and no first observance is recorded anywhere that can be checked. The most that can be said is that it was circulating on observance calendars well before 2020.

Even the name is unsettled, which is usually a sign that no single body ever defined it. It appears as Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day, as Uncommon Instruments Awareness Day, and as Uncommon Musical Instrument Day, depending on which listing you read. What is consistent across all of them is the date and the purpose: 31 July, and a nudge to look past the instruments you already know.

That vagueness is worth stating plainly rather than papering over. Plenty of published accounts of this day fill the gap with a plausible-sounding founder or a first celebration in a named year, and none of it survives checking. The day works perfectly well as an anonymous prompt, and the instruments it points at have documented histories of their own, which is where the interesting material actually is.

Why the unfamiliar instruments need a nudge

The set of instruments most people can name is not a ranking of merit. It is a residue of what got standardised, mass-produced and taught. Instruments fall out of use for reasons that have little to do with how they sound: Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica had all but vanished from public performance by about 1830, partly because it could not fill the larger concert halls then being built, and partly because it was made of glass and kept breaking.

The disappearing is not only historical. Somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 photoplayers were built to accompany silent films in the first decades of the twentieth century; fewer than fifty are known to survive and around a dozen still play. Meanwhile new instruments keep arriving. The Hang was built in Bern in 2000 and had spawned a whole family of handpans within a decade. A day like this is a cheap way of keeping both facts in view.

A short tour of the uncommon

Start with the strings, where the departure from the familiar is mostly a matter of scale and mechanism. The contrabass balalaika is a triangle taller than the player, plucked with leather plectrums rather than fingertips. The oud, from the Middle East, is the pear-bodied, fretless ancestor of the lute. The Swedish nyckelharpa is a fiddle with keys: the earliest known image of one is a relief of about 1350 on a gate of Källunge church on Gotland, and the oldest surviving example, the Moraharpa, is dated 1526.

The hurdy-gurdy applies that same keyed principle to a rosined wheel that bows the strings continuously. Its ancestor the organistrum appears in twelfth-century carvings and needed two people, one cranking and one working the keys. Among the winds, the Japanese shō is a mouth organ of upright bamboo pipes, the Swiss alphorn is a wooden horn several metres long, and conch shells have been cut into trumpets independently in cultures around the world. The serpent, a bass wind instrument that curves like its name, and the shofar, a ram’s horn sounded in Jewish worship, both survive mainly in liturgical use.

Percussion runs from the goblet-shaped West African djembe to the hang drum, a steel shell played with the bare hands. Past that the category stops being about tradition and starts being about invention. Rubbed glass bowls give the crystalline tone Franklin mechanised in 1761. The hydraulophone, named by the Canadian engineer Steve Mann, is played by blocking jets of water. The American Fotoplayer was a one-man orchestra for silent cinemas: a piano ringed with levers and pull-cords that fired bells, whistles and drums on cue. And the theremin, built by Leon Theremin in 1920, is played by moving your hands near two antennas without touching anything at all.

Uncommon depends on where you are standing

Uncommon is a relative term and worth handling carefully. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra makes exactly this point in its own piece on the day: an instrument treated as an exotic curiosity in one country is ordinary household equipment somewhere else. The didgeridoo is a novelty in a European fusion band and a long-established instrument of Indigenous Australian cultures in the north of Australia. The djembe is standard kit across a large part of West Africa. The crwth, a Welsh bowed lyre, is rare everywhere now, but it was not always.

The same holds for instruments that are common to a genre rather than a place. The bandoneón is unremarkable in Argentine tango and barely known outside it. The pipa and the shō have centuries of repertoire behind them in China and Japan. The kamancheh is a standard Persian spike fiddle, not an oddity. Approached this way the day is less a freak show than a reminder that the orchestra most readers picture is one region’s selection, formalised in the nineteenth century and then exported.

How the day is actually marked

Because nobody owns the date, what happens on it is whatever local institutions decide, and the pattern that recurs is hands-on. Instrument petting zoos let children pick things up and make a noise. Music schools run free introductory classes. Players of rare instruments give live demonstrations, and workshops are built around a single unusual instrument — a theremin, a glass armonica, a crwth. Lectures by music historians on how instruments are constructed turn up on the same date most years.

Online the day lives mostly as recommendation. Museums and orchestras post short demonstration videos, libraries publish listening lists, virtual concerts get scheduled, and posts collect under hashtags such as #UncommonInstrumentDay. Worth noting is the second half of the brief, the one the Chicago Symphony Orchestra highlights: the day encourages people not only to play an unfamiliar instrument but to make one. That is the part most easily done at home and most often skipped.

How to mark Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day

None of this needs equipment or a budget. Pick one, and finish it before 31 July is over.