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As he walked across the Wabash Avenue Bridge a couple of years ago, Hugh Musick had an idea. The visual artist was struck by “what a beautiful structure it was,” he says now, and thought about ways to celebrate it. He’s not a musician himself, but teamed up with a few friends who are, and together they worked on ways to “play” the bridge with percussion instruments. This weekend, as part of Chicago Artists Month, the Clark Street Bridge Percussion Orchestra will give what Musick calls a dress rehearsal of composer Eric Roth’s score. It calls for professional percussionists as well as a battery of volunteers to make music out of the Clark Street Bridge, which suits their needs better than the Wabash bridge to the east.

After his initial inspiration, Musick turned to Ben Massarella and Joe Adamik, percussionists in Califone. “I have no musical aptitude whatsoever,” Musick explains, somewhat ironically. As they collaborated, eventually bringing in producer Brian Deck (Iron and Wine, Modest Mouse), they ran into some limitations. “Brian eventually said, ‘You need a composer to put this piece together,’ ” Musick says. About eight months ago, Deck led him to Roth, a composer from Chicago who is working on a Ph.D. in composition at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Roth gave the project some clarity. Musick was especially excited about Roth’s experimental works, such as a piece for four performers whose only instrument is a Bible. (The work’s title is Bible Thumpin’.)

With Roth on board, the group then set out to see what it could do with the bridge. The testing phase wasn’t strictly serious: As the musicians banged on the bridge with drumsticks one afternoon, experimenting with the bridge’s sonorities, a group of passersby asked if they were inspecting the bridge. Eventually, they got what they needed and Roth had mapped out the bridge’s tonal range.

In his own art, Musick tries to alter the perceptions we have of the environment. In Story Bush (magnolia fabula),a 2006 project at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, he wrote a story on the leaves of a bush, then collected them as they died (naturally). He then arranged the story in the order of the leaves as they fell. “That piece was about looking at our surroundings, and looking at the creative potential of ordinary objects,” he says.

Musick hopes to work a similar temporal magic with the bridge. “We’re trying to create something experiential, where people can participate and exert some degree of change on the city,” he says. The individual contributions to the project, whether his own or Roth’s, are ultimately less important than the controlled freedom of the volunteers who will take part.

Roth designed the work for a core group of six to eight professional drummers, with the middle section of the work opened up into a jam session for roughly 15 volunteers. At the first rehearsal on September 8, people walking past the bridge “had these huge smiles on their faces,” Musick says. “It’s because you wouldn’t think that you could make something that industrial, so heavy, so intimidating-looking sound so playful.”

Roth’s piece doesn’t tap into the ambient potential of the bridge—you won’t find anyone simply smacking an I-beam and letting it ring. After mapping out the bridge’s sonorities, he created a piece with simple rhythms tapped onto the structure; that’s the playfulness to which Musick refers. The 45-minute work opens and closes with these precisely composed passages that will be played by the professionals. “Relatively simple rhythms played on architecture become transformative,” Musick says.

Traffic will be blocked for an hour to accommodate the performance. “We want people to walk away from it thinking, I’m not going to look at everything the same way,” Musick says. Instead of a collection of beams, grates and rust-colored paint, the individual sections of the bridge will take on the personalities of those making music with them. The hulking structure probably won’t sing, but it will take on an altered, more exalted state, and it’s likely that those in the immediate vicinity will, too.

The Clark Street Bridge Performance takes place Saturday 6 from noon to 1pm.