Audio Slide Show: Traffic Jam Session

FARMINGTON - Dan Robbins, a player of the penny whistle and bodhrain or Irish drum, never imagined using his late-model Toyota Solara to make music.

"This is the biggest instrument I've ever played," said Robbins, sitting at the wheel of his convertible on Tuesday.

A Farmington-based Celtic musician in the band Talisker, Robbins joined about 50 other drivers in five different parking lots on the University of Maine at Farmington campus in a one-of-a-kind musical performance.

On cue he honked his horn - up to 47 honks at times - slammed his car door open and shut, revved his engine, turned his radio up and down and even stepped out of the vehicle to read a poem or shout out the make and model of his car.

The drivers, not all of them musicians, took cues from five different conductors waving colored flags, who in turn took cues from the automotive maestro, Steve Pane, a UMF music professor.

Pane stood at a podium on the back porch of the school's psychology building wildly waving flags himself to signal the conductors under him and the driver-musicians under them.

Together they created a cacophony of coordinated car sounds that sounded like music to some.

Others, including some musicians, described the performance as a noise reminiscent of a New York City traffic maelstrom.

Still others said they were too busy following the instructions and the score to really pay attention to what kind of music they were making.

"I can't really tell you what it sounded like," said Celeste Branham, UMF's vice president for student and community services. "There was actually a lot of yelling in the cars."

"We could tell you were off a beat," said Allen Berger, UMF provost and vice president for academic affairs. Berger was also an under-conductor Tuesday.

"Car Life: a traffic jam session for automobile orchestra" written by Pane's colleague and fellow UMF music professor Philip Carlsen was born. Laid up in bed with a case of sciatica, Carlsen was unable to conduct or even hear the orchestra himself. It had never been performed before, not even in practice, he said from his home Tuesday night. "That was part of the fun of writing the piece, to try and write it in a way that it could be done without rehearsal," Carlsen said.

Its inspiration came in part from a former professor of Carlsen's and from the work of American composer John Cage, Carlsen said.

"The idea is music is happening all around us," Carlsen said. "We just need to open our ears and be able to hear it. Hear the sounds of the world as being a kind of music and my piece is in that spirit."

He, at first, considered arranging the cars based on the tonal quality of their horns, or the sound their fasten seat belt warnings or door-open beepers made, but later decided a random arrangement would be best.

"I did notice a lot of people had Toyotas, so I put them all in one choir," Carlsen said.

The performance was the kickoff event for the Michael D. Wilson Symposium, a 24-hour campuswide celebration of undergraduate research and creative achievements.

Carlsen said some of his friends reported the piece was "quite moving" and that the second performance Tuesday sounded better than the first.

For those who believed it sounded like the Big Apple at rush hour Carlsen said, "This is taking something and looking at it in a whole new way. So the next time you are in New York you can appreciate it."