Every day brings some wild new music venture, like dancing robots you control with your voice or an algorithm that turns songs into meatballs (seriously). In that light, the music of Pawel Romanczuk, who’s appearing this evening at MIT, is a rejoinder: He makes music using kids’ toys, creating an enchanting sound that feels fancifully out of step with the world.
Romanczuk and his band, Small Instruments, use toy pianos, xylophones, child-sized clarinets, and all manner of homemade instruments concocted from readily available materials. At MIT this week, Romanczuk has been helping students make instruments from PVC pipes, balloons, straws, and wood. The ensemble, which includes a triangular harp with tunable strings fashioned out of a vegetable carton, debuts tonight at MIT, and Romanczuk anticipates the performance will lean heavily on improvisation. He says the effort is about “finding a new way for making music, searching for new sources of sound.”
Evan Ziporyn, a composer and faculty member at MIT, invited Romanczuk to Cambridge after he met him in his workshop in Poland in 2013. He says Romanczuk’s music reminds him of artistic movements in the early 20th century that jabbed at the pretensions of modern art. “It’s humorous, but there’s still substance to it,” Ziporyn says. “Even the humor is there for a reason, to bring people down to earth, back to real size.”
Pawel Romanczuk appears Friday, Jan. 9, from 5-8 p.m. at MIT Museum N51, 265 Massachusetts Ave. Click here for more information.
Watch: Small Instruments
Kevin Hartnett is a writer in South Carolina. He can be reached at kshartnett18@gmail.com.