Gallon buckets, tin cans create `gadgetone' in 1941
Music, defined by MerriamWebster is: The science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity.
The definition does not say that to be music it must be performed by trained professionals, beautiful instruments or even sound good.
The Daily Oklahoman on Nov. 20, 1941, announced the first and probably only performance of the “gadgetone” at a musical training conference held in Shawnee:
A peculiar device is the gadget one. Will Loft on, Chick as ha, played it for the old-time fiddle rs' orchestra at the WPA music training conference at Shawnee Wednesday. Tomtoms made of old innertubes stretched across gallon buckets, an epsom salts can, a baking powder can and a couple of pieces of brass picked up in an alley make it up. The conference ate up Lofton's world premiere of his B sharp concerto for gadgetone.
The conference was a part of the Great Depression's Works Progress Administration's Federal Music Project.
According to the entry for the Works Progress Administration in the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture available at okhistory.org:
More than two hundred musicians participated in teaching, conducting music research, and playing in smalltown orchestras. … Teaching was probably the most successful activity, with as many as fifteen hundred classes conducted throughout the state at one point.
Maybe Lofton, a musical instructor at Chickasha, was attempting to show that music can be made without expensive i nstruments or perhaps he was auditioning for his own one-man band.
Whatever his intent, the gadgetone seems to be unique to Lofton and Oklahoma as further searching found no mention of it as a musical instrument by that name.