Outside the train station in Martinsburg there is this odd rusted sculpture, like a planarian curled into a spiral, with a metal ball capping each tip. The whole thing is about six feet in diameter and is held vertical by a pole that's seated in what looks a little like an old butter churn.

In some ways it's just unremarkable American public sculpture, stylishly abstracted and a little self-consciously cartoonish, as if embarrassed by the fact that it's meaningless space filler to the vast majority of people who past it without a second look. They must be a better way of bringing art into public life. How lucky the Italians are, that the forces of history embodied in everyday architecture engender a casual familiarity with the aesthetic.

We'd spent some time walking around the empty Sunday station, across the tracks to the ruins of two crumbling brick roundhouses. One of the buildings is almost completely leveled. Only a quarter of the curved outside wall still stands, the roof having long ago collapsed, and ivy runs over the ruins like a fluid. The other roundhouse is under a new roof, but the windows are sealed shut with splintering plywood and grass grows thigh-high in front of the massive doors. Large white signs posted near the wall, just inside a perimeter of barbed-wire, trumpet the dollar amounts that have been donated by federal and state agencies for the building's renovation. What the old roundhouse will someday become is never mentioned.

We stumbled along the railroad tracks for a while, in the peculiar autistic gait of people keeping their feet on the crossties, then circled back up the hill to the car. We passed the sculpture again. "It would be great if this turned," I said, laying a hand on one edge. And it did. As the vertical shaft rotated in its butter-churn base, it emitted a low metallic thrum, a subsonic groan that sent my sternum into disquieting sympathetic vibration.

I tentatively rotated the sculpture one way and then the other, momentarily convinced I'd just broken it. Deep pulses punctuated by whale squeals emerged from where the rod entered the base. It was positively wonderful. Rotating the sculpture at different speeds varied the pitch and intensity of the tone. At precise slow rotations it would begin singing in a single violin note atop the bass notes, a plaintive, mammalian voice that never lasted long. Odd, momentary vibrations played like single-note countermelodies and fell again into an aching low range. It was surprisingly loud in the quiet Sunday afternoon of empty railroad tracks and fallen-down brick buildings.

I felt like I had an entire orchestra to play with, albeit through limited interaction (rotational direction and acceleration), and producing bizarre, shifting tone combinations with an industrial flavor. The music seemed like the product of an intelligence I was influencing, but not necessarily controlling: it was sufficiently unpredictable to be alive, but not so controlled to be the direct result of my actions, as would a machine. As always, life emerges on the border between chaos and order.

Now, I thought, I have to find out who the artist is and have a talk with him or her. And I have to get a decent recording device out here for a concert some other Sunday.