MIT’s Glass Band Performs Tonight
Instruments: glass bowls, flutes, horns, a “vitreous membranophone”
The MIT Glass Band will perform on hand-blown instruments tonight in a concert at the MIT Museum. Photo courtesy of MIT Glass Band
Remember playing with glass cups filled with water as a child, tapping them with a spoon to create varied sounds? Maybe you even mastered the art of blowing into a bottle, creating a low, sonorous vibration. But chances are you’ve never listened to a band playing only glass-blown instruments.
Tonight the MIT Glass Band will perform a concert it’s billing as “one-of-a-kind sound symphonies” at the MIT Museum in Cambridge as part of its Second Fridays series. The musicians will play on instruments fashioned in the hot shop of MIT’s Glass Lab.
Between sets, student filmmakers from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School will show a video they made featuring Glass Lab director Peter Houk.
The MIT Glass Band, begun in 2013 as a collaboration between the Glass Lab and MIT’s Center for Arts, Science, and Technology, comprises MIT students and alumni interested in exploring the intersection of glass and music. The idea came about after MIT alum Kaitlyn Becker, a technical director at MIT’s Materials Processing Center, began to experiment with making oboes and didgeridoos out of glass.
From there, Houk began collaborating with instrumentalist, composer, and instrument designer Mark Stewart, a visiting artist at MIT. Over the course of a year, Stewart, who has worked with musical legends Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, and others, worked with students to craft an assortment of instruments producing various tonal qualities.
Guests tonight will experience an evening of “silica sonority,” according to the museum: a glass bowl being strummed by a violin bow, a glass flute and horn, and a vitreous membranophone, an “uncategorizable” flask-shaped instrument designed especially by Houk.
The MIT Glass Band performs tonight, Friday, June 12, at the MIT Museum, 265 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, from 5 to 8 p.m. The event is free with regular museum admission: $10, $5 for youth under 18, students, and seniors, and free for ages 5 and under. Find more information about other Second Fridays events here. Take an MBTA Red Line train to Central Square. The MIT Museum is a seven-minute walk from there.
Michelle Marino can be reached at michelle.g.marino@gmail.com.
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