There were no traditional chords or familiar melodies on the sheet music given to University of Maine at Farmington student Audrey Gidman.

There were, however, cues for crackling, gurgling and scratching sounds.

With cranks and levers, Gidman and other members of the UMF Experimental Arts Ensemble performed with 16 20th-century instruments at a concert last month alongside professionals at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

“It was very bizarre,” she said.

Gustavo Aguilar, an assistant professor of experimental performance at UMF, said the students’ professionalism and their enthusiasm should be commended. The students — some of whom had never read music before — agreed to the 15-hour trip to Cleveland with less than a week’s notice after the ensemble originally scheduled to play couldn’t make it to the performance. Aguilar said they received a standing ovation after their performance at the end of a week of practicing.

“They were so enthusiastic,” Aguilar said. “They were definitely on a high afterward, and they should be.”

The intoners played by the students were inspired by the Industrial Revolution and the new noises that accompanied the era, such as water gurgling through pipes and factories whirring.

“The industrial era had started, and when it arrived, (it went) through Italy like a bullet,” said Aguilar.

In 1913, Italian artist Russolo decided to intentionally recreate these new fangled sounds as music with instruments of his own creation. The intoners he built roared, rustled, cracked, howled and shrieked. The unorthodox approach to music inspired other futurists later on, said Aguilar.

The instruments were lost, however, during World War II. Aguilar said there are theories that they were burned for heat during the war, but no one knows for sure what happened to them.

The UMF students played 16 reproductions of the instruments that were created by California luthier Keith Cary in 2009. Aguilar said there weren’t detailed blueprints available so the instruments had to be rebuilt by Cary’s best estimates based on photos, a few sketches and notes.

The replicas are housed at the University of Maine and were going to be used by a professional ensemble in January at the Cleveland Museum of Art. But those plans fell through, and Aguilar’s group of UMF students was asked to fill in and work with conductor Luciano Chessa at the concert.

Aguilar said in less than six hours he had made travel arrangements, and 11 of the students were able to go.

They were in Ohio a week after Aguilar received the phone call and practiced 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day in the week leading up to the Jan 16 performance.

The rehearsals were on public display in a live museum exhibit. As the students tried to figure out the instruments, people passing by tried to figure out what the students were up to.

“People don’t know quite what to make of it,” Gidman said. “We were all learning it together.”

At times, the sounds of the instruments grinded against each other, and other times they moved along with each other, she said.

In one of the newer songs, written by Christopher Burns, the score was handwritten with all words, and the musicians used their cellphones with metronome apps as part of the song.

“It was about the clashing of technology,” said Gidman.

Kaitlin Schroeder — 861-9252

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