Car Music Project

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 Fact|date=July 2008). The band, a live performance and recording ensemble, is part of the project.

The Project

The project began in 1995 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.

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 Eric Haltmeier 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. Most recently the band appeared at Lincoln Center Out of Doors on 8/5/07.

Shortly thereafter, during the fall of 2007, Ray Faunce III created 30 playable instruments for the Ford Motor Company in the United Kingdom for a television commercial for the 2008 European Ford Focus. He worked with Biscuit Filmworks and Ogilvy Advertising, designing the instruments for director Noam Murro. Milbrodt assembled a team of about 22 people to design and construct the instruments over a period of 7 weeks, working with Biscuit's Production Designer and the members of his band, the Car Music Project, to get them ready for a shoot on a soundstage at Universal Studios in early November, 2007. The commercial's music was composed by Craig Richey, performed on the instruments metal sculptor Ray Faunce III made, and recorded at Capitol Records in Los Angeles. The instruments made by metal sculptor Ray Faunce III will begin the first leg of a European exhibit tour in the spring of 2008.

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

Related work

The Car Music Project's metal sculptor, Ray Faunce III, was also involved in the production of musical instruments from a Ford Focus for a TV commercial in which an orchestra played music on the Ford instruments. The music in the TV commercial, though recorded in a studio and dubbed over visual recordings of the musicians playing the instruments, actually does come from the Ford Focus instruments (i.e. no other instruments were used in the overdub) [http://createdigitalmusic.com/2008/02/06/yes-virginia-there-really-is-a-ford-car-part-musical-ensemble/] .

Composer Flip Baber, aka Johnny Random, did a similar work with bicycle parts [http://www.synthtopia.com/news/06_12/Nutcracker-Suite-Bike-Par.html]

Wendy Mae Chambers also built a Car Horn Organ (an organ made from automobile horns) in 1983 [http://www.wendymae.com/carhornorgan.html] .

External links

* [http://www.carmusicproject.com The official Car Music Project web site]
* [http://www.oddmusic.com/gallery/om06850.html Oddmusic.com's Car Music Project page]
* [http://createdigitalmusic.com/2008/02/05/interview-building-a-musical-ensemble-out-of-ford-focus-car-parts/ Musical ensemble made out of Ford Focus car parts]
*See also, [http://createdigitalmusic.com/2006/11/28/nutcracker-suite-played-exclusively-on-bicycle-parts/ Nutcracker Suite Played Exclusively on Bicycle Parts]

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