Musical Celebrations Around the World – Uncommon Instruments Awareness Day

Every July 31, Uncommon Instruments Awareness Day encourages musicians, educators, and curious listeners to explore instruments they may not encounter in an everyday rehearsal or concert.

Some of these instruments are historic. Others use electronic technology, unusual materials, or entirely different approaches to producing sound. Many are common within a particular region or musical tradition but may be unfamiliar to audiences elsewhere.

That distinction is important. Calling an instrument “uncommon” does not mean it is strange, obscure, or less sophisticated. It may simply fall outside the musical experiences of a particular listener. The observance offers an opportunity to expand those experiences and discover how musicians around the world have continually invented new ways to create sound.

What Makes an Instrument Uncommon?

The answer often depends on who is listening.

A mellophone may look unfamiliar to someone outside the marching arts, but it is a regular part of many drum and bugle corps and marching bands. A sheng may be unfamiliar to many American students, but it has an ancient history and an established place within Chinese music. Electronic instruments such as the theremin once seemed futuristic, but they have now influenced generations of composers, performers, and sound designers.

Instruments may become uncommon when musical styles change, when new technology replaces older designs, or when an instrument remains closely connected to one geographic area or performance tradition. Others were created for a particular composer, performer, experiment, or artistic problem and never became part of a standard ensemble.

The Musical Instrument Museum’s Geographic Galleries display thousands of instruments representing musical traditions from around the world. Exploring a collection like this quickly demonstrates that the instruments commonly seen in a school band or orchestra represent only a small part of the ways people make music.

Instruments Worth Discovering

Uncommon Instruments Awareness Day can serve as an introduction to instruments from several different periods, cultures, and methods of sound production.

The Mellophone

The mellophone is a brass instrument most often associated with marching bands and drum and bugle corps. It typically covers the middle brass range performed by French horns in a concert ensemble, but its forward-facing bell and compact design help project sound outdoors.

Many people recognize the mellophone when they see or hear one but cannot identify it by name. This made it a fitting example in the original Uncommon Instruments Awareness Day calendar. It also provides a useful classroom comparison between instruments designed for indoor concert performance and those adapted for movement and outdoor projection.

The Theremin

The theremin is played without physical contact. A performer moves their hands near two antennae, using one to control pitch and the other to control volume. The result is a continuous, often otherworldly sound that requires precise control of distance and movement.

An RCA theremin in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection dates from 1929. Approximately 500 RCA instruments were originally produced, helping introduce one of the earliest electronic instruments to a wider public.

The theremin offers students an unusual way to explore pitch, frequency, gesture, electronic sound, and the relationship between a performer’s physical movement and the resulting music.

The Sheng

The sheng is a Chinese mouth organ made from a collection of pipes set into a wind chamber. A musician can produce sound while both inhaling and exhaling, and the instrument can play several pitches at once.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s sheng collection traces the instrument’s history back thousands of years. The sheng has appeared in court music, folk traditions, opera, ensembles, and contemporary compositions. Related free-reed instruments eventually influenced the development of instruments such as the harmonica, accordion, and reed organ.

Introducing the sheng can help students see that musical invention does not move in only one direction. Instrument designs, performance techniques, and musical ideas have traveled among cultures for centuries.

The Hurdy-Gurdy

The hurdy-gurdy produces sound through strings, but instead of using a bow, the performer turns a crank that rotates a rosined wheel against the strings. Keys change the pitches of the melody strings, while other strings may provide a continuous drone.

The combination can sound like a meeting of a string instrument, keyboard, and bagpipe. Historic examples, including an 18th-century French hurdy-gurdy, demonstrate both the instrument’s musical function and the detailed craftsmanship involved in its construction.

Versions of the instrument have appeared in European folk, court, dance, and contemporary music. Today, performers continue to adapt the hurdy-gurdy for traditional repertoire, new compositions, film music, and experimental styles.

The Glass Armonica

The glass armonica creates sound through a series of tuned glass bowls mounted on a rotating spindle. The performer touches the rims with moistened fingers, producing sustained tones similar to those created by rubbing the edge of a drinking glass.

Benjamin Franklin developed the instrument in 1761 after hearing musicians perform on individual glasses. Composers including Mozart and Beethoven later wrote music for glass instruments. The Smithsonian explores the invention in its overview of Benjamin Franklin’s inventions, while an 18th-century glass harmonica remains part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s instrument collection.

The glass armonica gives students a way to connect music with physics, materials, invention, and changes in public taste. An instrument can be celebrated in one period, largely disappear in another, and later be rediscovered by new performers.

Mechanical and Experimental Instruments

Not every musical instrument requires a performer to strike, bow, blow, pluck, or sing in a traditional way.

Barrel organs, music boxes, player pianos, mechanical zithers, and automated instruments use pins, cylinders, discs, paper rolls, gears, air systems, or other mechanisms to store and reproduce music. The Musical Instrument Museum’s Mechanical Music Gallery explores instruments that could play programmed music long before digital recording and playback existed.

Contemporary musicians continue that tradition of experimentation. Artists build instruments from electronics, water, recycled materials, computer sensors, industrial equipment, and objects never originally intended to make music.

Experimental instruments can begin with a practical question: How can a performer control pitch without touching anything? What happens when water replaces air? Can a sculpture also function as an instrument? How can an electronic sensor translate movement into sound?

These questions show that instrument design is a form of composition. The creator determines what sounds are possible, how performers interact with them, and what kinds of music the instrument invites people to make.

Ways to Celebrate Uncommon Instruments Awareness Day

Music educators can use July 31 as inspiration for a summer activity or save these ideas for the beginning of the school year.

• Create an instrument discovery project. Assign each student an unfamiliar instrument and ask them to research where it developed, how it produces sound, who performs it, and what musical traditions use it.
• Listen before revealing the instrument. Play a short recording without showing the performer. Ask students to describe the sound and predict how it might have been created.
• Explore a museum collection. The Musical Instrument Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Smithsonian Music provide extensive digital collections that students can explore from the classroom.
• Compare familiar and unfamiliar relatives. Pair a sheng with an accordion, a hurdy-gurdy with a violin, or a mellophone with a French horn. Discuss how design changes affect technique, tone, and performance setting.
• Build a simple sound-making object. Challenge students to create an instrument using safe, available materials. The goal should be controlling pitch, rhythm, volume, or tone rather than merely making noise.
• Design an imaginary instrument. Students can sketch an instrument, explain how it would be played, identify its materials, and describe the type of ensemble or music for which it was created.
• Invite a local musician. A specialist in historical instruments, electronic music, folk traditions, instrument repair, or instrument building can demonstrate techniques students may never otherwise encounter.
• Feature uncommon sounds in a concert. Program a work using an unusual instrument, nontraditional technique, or unexpected combination of instruments. Provide context so the audience understands what it is hearing.

Exploring Instruments With Context and Respect

Discovering an unfamiliar instrument should involve more than reacting to its appearance or unusual sound.

An instrument may carry religious, ceremonial, political, historical, or community significance. It may traditionally be played only in particular settings or taught through a method that differs from a Western school ensemble. It may also have several regional forms, names, tunings, and performance techniques.

Educators should identify the people and culture connected to the instrument, use accurate terminology, and avoid presenting an established tradition as a novelty. Whenever possible, students should learn from musicians and resources connected directly to that tradition.

This approach turns curiosity into meaningful musical understanding. Students learn not only how an instrument sounds, but also why it exists and what it communicates to the people who play and hear it.

Discovering New Sounds Through Travel

Travel can introduce musicians to instruments, ensembles, and performance traditions they have previously encountered only through a recording or classroom lesson.

A workshop with local musicians can demonstrate how an instrument is taught, tuned, held, and used within an ensemble. A museum visit can place historical instruments alongside the objects, artwork, and communities connected to them. A live performance can reveal how sound, movement, architecture, and audience participation work together.

These experiences can be valuable for every type of ensemble. Band musicians may encounter regional wind and percussion traditions. Orchestra members can explore historic string instruments and performance practices. Choirs can hear how voices interact with instruments in sacred, theatrical, and community settings.

Encore’s customized band trips, orchestra trips, and choir trips combine performance with cultural and musical discovery. Workshops, exchanges, concerts, museum visits, and local performances can help musicians better understand the many ways people create and share music.

Directors can also explore the Encore Repertoire Library to see how other traveling ensembles have programmed music for different venues, audiences, and instrumental combinations.

Staying Curious About Sound

Uncommon Instruments Awareness Day is ultimately a celebration of musical curiosity.

Every instrument began as an idea. Someone experimented with a material, changed an existing design, solved a performance problem, or discovered that an unexpected object could produce a meaningful sound.

By exploring instruments outside their usual experience, musicians can discover new techniques, histories, cultures, and creative possibilities. They may also begin to see familiar instruments differently and recognize that musical traditions are always changing through invention and exchange.

July 31 offers a reason to begin that exploration, but there will always be another instrument, sound, or musical community waiting to be discovered.

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This article is part of our Musical Celebrations Around the World series, created to help music educators and ensemble leaders explore the people, traditions, and observances featured in the Encore Tours Musical Celebrations Calendar.

Bring New Musical Discoveries to Your Ensemble

Encore Tours creates customized international concert tours that combine meaningful performances with opportunities to encounter the musical traditions of each destination. Speak with one of our tour consultants to begin exploring the possibilities for your ensemble.