Car Music Project
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The Car Music Project is both the name of a project and the name of a band conceived and led by American composer Bill Milbrodt (the pronunciation "mil-brot", with a long "o" sound, is the single name he seems to prefer). The band, a live performance and recording ensemble, is part of the project.
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[edit] The Project
The project began in 1994 as an attempt by Milbrodt to "turn a car into music that can be expressed in written form and, therefore, performed and interpreted by more than one musician or group of musicians." More specifically, Milbrodt wanted playable musical instruments created from his own car, and wanted them to represent the four instrument families of the traditional orchestra: winds, brass, percussion, and strings. To accomplish his goal, he hired professional auto mechanics to disassemble his car, and commissioned metal sculptor Ray Faunce III to create a series of playable musical instruments from the car's parts. Faunce worked with a team that included musicians, an engineer, a physicist, a glass cutter, and others to create a series of instruments, some of which are "purebred" (only car parts) and some of which are "hybrids" (car parts plus traditional musical instrument parts). The resulting instruments have names like Convertibles and Tube Flutes (winds), Strutbone and Exhaustaphone (brass), Percarsion (percussion, of course), and Tank Bass and Air Guitar (strings). Milbrodt and his team have fully documented the general capabilities and tuning idiosyncrasies of all the instruments.
[edit] The band
In its present form, as an ongoing ensemble called the "Car Music Project" was started by Milbrodt in early 2005. (Previously, Milbrodt and individual members of the current ensemble had performed in an ad hoc fashion, pulling the musicians together for rehearsal when the need arose.) The members of the Car Music Project include Dave Homan on reed and non-reed instruments classified as "winds", James Spotto on instruments classified as "brass", William Trigg on Percarsion, and Wilbo Wright and Milbrodt on strings. The band's leader and composer is Milbrodt. The Car Music Project performed several concerts in 2005, culminating with a performance at the Philadelphia Live Arts & Fringe Festival.
[edit] References
The sources for this article include
- an article by Scott Morgan, Princeton Packet, July 20, 2005
- "ARTology", a column by Tullio DeSantis, Reading Eagle, July 25, 2005
- a backstage discussion with Milbrodt and other bandmembers at a September 2005 Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival performance
[edit] External links
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