Aaron Friedman, who is coordinating what city officials say is one of the largest musical events in the city’s history, shuffled into the Citizens for NYC offices Sunday at 9 a.m. and hadn’t returned home as of yesterday evening.

“I didn’t sleep last night,” the quiet, 29-year-old composer said. “I’m wearing the same clothes.”

On Thursday, the first day of summer, there will be more than 560 performances in venues ranging from a cemetery in the East Village to the Metropolitan Opera. A bluegrass band will play on the Brooklyn Bridge and a group will play experimental music with instruments powered by solar energy at Stuyvesant Cove Park, among other performances. The event is called Make Music New York.

The event began in Paris in 1982 as a day-long music festival under the name Fete de la Musique. This year, 340 cities, including Rome and Tokyo, will host similar days of music.

With three days to go, Mr. Friedman said musicians were ringing his cell phone every few minutes and he was struggling to ensure that every event has the proper permit. He has been working seven days a week for the past month, he said.

“Doing anything of this size in New York is … ,” he said, searching for the word, “difficult.”

Last summer he made a trip to France to see how Paris was transformed by the nearly 1,000 Fete de la Musique concerts that lingered into the night. He met with organizers to get advice on how to start a similar event in New York. When he returned he contacted Citizens for NYC, hired a group of interns, and started making calls to neighborhood associations and community groups. His interns, mostly music students from New York and Columbia universities, each recruited musicians from an assigned genre of music.

One intern, Shalini Agrawal, 20, said she visited open mikes and restaurants that hosted Latin performers to find willing musicians.
An “avalanche of musicians” came directly to Mr. Friedman after the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers sent out an e-mail message to its 25,000 members.

Among the musicians there are at least a dozen ukelele players, he said, and many bands specifically asked to play on bridges.
Much of Mr. Friedman’s job was matching the right musicians with the right spaces, he said.

“A garden on the Upper West Side wanted a classical performer and I would help find someone, often right next door,” he said.

Three years ago, Mr. Friedman, who plays jazz saxophone, was leading a different campaign. Frustrated with car alarms going off every 20 minutes outside his apartment in Washington Heights, where he was trying to write chamber music, he formed a group to fight back called Silent Majority: Citizens Against Car Alarms.

“I said to myself, ‘Why do we have to put up with this?'” he said. His work contributed to legislation that passed in the City Council banning certain types of sensitive alarms.

“This project is sort of the inverse of that,” he said of “Make Music New York.” “Instead of quieting the aggravating sounds, it’s about instigating the interesting ones.”

Mr. Friedman said he sees a connection between the city’s “soundscape” and social interactions.

“People have eyelids, but they don’t have earlids,” he said. “Sound is something you are forced to interact with through the day. … One of the things that makes New York unique is the incredible density of sound and people, which can create feelings of claustrophobia and anonymity.”

“This is kind of a project to create all of these surprising, charming creative interactions as opposed to the general cacophony that most people are hearing,” he said.

Born to a judge in Berkeley, Calif., Mr. Friedman moved to New York after graduating from Swarthmore College with a degree in music.

The founder of Fete de la Musique in Paris, Jack Lang, a former minister of culture, is flying to New York to attend the performances. He will start out at Shea Stadium on Wednesday night, where the French jazz guitarist Sylvain Luc will perform and Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey will sing the national anthem before the Mets game.

A full listing of the events can be found at makemusicny.org.