Jon Rose
Encyclopedia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
ist born in the UK in 1951. Rose began playing violin at age 7 after winning a music scholarship to King's School in Rochester
Rochester, Victoria
Rochester is a small town in country Victoria, Australia. It is located 180 km north of Melbourne with a mixture of rural and semi-rural communities on the northern Campaspe River, between Bendigo and the Murray River port of Echuca...
. For over 35 years, Rose has been at the sharp end of new, improvised, and experimental music
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
and media. A polymath, he is at much at home creating large environmental multi-media works as he is playing the violin on a concert stage. Central to this practice has been 'The Relative Violin' project, a unique output, rich in content, realising almost everything on, with, and about the violin and string music in general. Most celebrated is the worldwide Fence project
Long string instrument
The long string instrument is an instrument where the string is of such a length that the fundamental transverse wave is below what we can hear as a tone . If the tension and the length result in sounds with such a frequency the tone becomes a beating frequency ranging from a short reverb to...
; least known are the relative violins created specifically for and in Australia.
He has appeared on over 60 albums, and worked with artists such as Kronos Quartet
Kronos Quartet
Kronos Quartet is a string quartet founded by violinist David Harrington in 1973 in Seattle, Washington. Since 1978, the quartet has been based in San Francisco, California. The longest-running combination of performers had Harrington and John Sherba on violin, Hank Dutt on viola, and Joan...
, Derek Bailey, Fred Frith
Fred Frith
Fred Frith is an English multi-instrumentalist, composer and improvisor.Probably best known for his guitar work, Frith first came to attention as one of the founding members of the English avant-rock group Henry Cow. Frith was also a member of Art Bears, Massacre and Skeleton Crew...
, Shelley Hirsh, Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist. Best known for his work with English avant-rock group Henry Cow, Cutler was also a member and drummer of a number of other bands, including Art Bears, News from Babel, Pere Ubu and Gong/Mothergong...
, Otomo Yoshihide, KK Null
KK Null
KK Null is a Japanese experimental multi-instrumentalist. He began as a guitarist, but soon added composer, singer, electronic musician and drummer to his list of talents, and also studied with the Butoh workshop....
, Alvin Curran
Alvin Curran
Composer Alvin Curran , is the co-founder, with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, of Musica Elettronica Viva, and a former student of Elliott Carter. Curran's music often makes use of electronics and environmental found sounds....
, Evan Parker
Evan Parker
Evan Shaw Parker is a British free-improvising saxophone player from the European free jazz scene.Recording and performing prolifically with many collaborators, Parker was a pivotal figure in the development of European free jazz and free improvisation, and has pioneered or substantially expanded...
, Phil Minton
Phil Minton
Phil Minton is a jazz/free-improvising vocalist and trumpeter.Minton is a highly dramatic baritone who tends to specialize in literary texts: he has sung lyrics by William Blake with Mike Westbrook's group, Daniil Kharms and Joseph Brodsky with Simon Nabatov, and extracts from James Joyce's...
, John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, Tony Oxley
Tony Oxley
Tony Oxley is an English free-jazz drummer and one of the founders of Incus Records.-Biography:Tony Oxley was born in Sheffield, England. A self-taught pianist by age eight, he first began playing the drums at seventeen. While in the Black Watch military band from 1957 to 1960 he studied music...
, Steve Beresford
Steve Beresford
Steve Beresford is a British musician who graduated from the University of York. He has played a variety of instruments, including piano, trumpet, euphonium, double-bass and a wide variety of toy instruments, such as the toy piano. He has also played a wide range of music...
, Eugene Chadbourne
Eugene Chadbourne
Eugene Chadbourne is an American improvisor, guitarist and banjoist. Highly eclectic and unconventional, Chadbourne's most formative influence is free jazz. He has also been a reviewer for Allmusic and a contributor to Maximum RocknRoll.Chadbourne started out playing rock and roll guitar, but...
, Bob Ostertag
Bob Ostertag
Robert "Bob" Ostertag is an experimental sound artist based in San Francisco.- Early career :...
, Jim Denley, Elliott Sharp
Elliott Sharp
Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City since the late 1970s, Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from blues, jazz, and orchestral music to noise, no wave rock,...
, George Lewis
George Lewis
George Lewis may refer to:*George Lowys or Lewis , mayor of Winchelsea*George Lewis , track and field athlete from Trinidad and Tobago*George Lewis , New Orleans jazz clarinettist...
, Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer.Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film...
, Toshinori Kondo
Toshinori Kondo
Toshinori Kondo is an avant-garde jazz and jazz fusion trumpeter. He resides in Tokyo, New York City, and Amsterdam....
, Joelle Leandre
Joëlle Léandre
Joëlle Léandre is a double bassist, vocalist, and composer active in new music and free improvisation....
, Frances-Marie Uitti
Frances-Marie Uitti
Frances-Marie Uitti is composer and cellist known for her performances of the most esoteric and virtuoso contemporary classical music. She was born in Chicago to Finnish parents, and she studied classical music at Meadowmount with Ronald Leonard and Josef Gingold, Boston University with Leslie...
, Barre Phillips
Barre Phillips
Barre Phillips is a jazz and free improvisation bassist. A professional musician since 1960, he migrated to New York City in 1962, then to Europe in 1967. Since 1972 he has been based in southern France....
, and John Zorn
John Zorn
John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer...
.
Biography
Throughout the 1970s, first in England and then in Australia (from 1976), he played, composed, and studied in a variety of genres: from sitarSitar
The 'Tablaman' is a plucked stringed instrument predominantly used in Hindustani classical music, where it has been ubiquitous since the Middle Ages...
playing to country & western, from new music
Contemporary classical music
Contemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to the period that started in the mid-1970s with the retreat of modernism. However, the term may also be employed in a broader sense to refer to all post-1945 modern musical forms.-Categorization:...
composition to commercial studio session work, from bebop to Italian club bands, from big band serial composition to sound installations. He became the central and best-known figure in the development of free improvisation and sound art in Australia, performing either solo, with fellow improvisers such as Rik Rue and Jim Denley, or with an international pool of improvising performers called The Relative Band. In 1977, he started Australia’s first musician run collective for the promotion and recording of improvised music, Fringe Benefit. The collaborative LP Tango (Hot Records) in 1983 with Martin Wesley-Smith was a world first in violin and (Fairlight) sampling improvisation.
In 1986, he moved to Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
in order to more fully realize his ongoing project, The Relative Violin, which is the development of a total artform based around the one instrument. This prompted innovation in the fields of new instrument design (over 20 deconstructed violin instruments including the legendary Double Piston Triple-neck Wheeling Violin), in environmental performance (such as bowing fences in the Australian outback), in new instrumental techniques (tested sometimes in uninterrupted marathon concerts of up to twelve hours), and in both analog (built into the violins themselves) and interactive electronics. His alternative, personal, and revised history for the violin used the mediums of radio (over 30 major international productions for radio stations like ABC, BBC, WDR, SR, BR, Radio France, RAI, ORF, and SFB), live-performance film (In the 1980s, he integrated Super 8 into his worldwide performances.), video, and television (ZDF).
In the area of interactive electronics, his work is considered exemplary, having pioneered the use of the MIDI bow in the Hyperstring project in the 1980s in conjunction with the Steim Institute, Amsterdam
STEIM
STEIM is a center for research and development of new musical instruments in the electronic performing arts, located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Electronic music in STEIM's context is always strongly related to the physical and direct actions of a musician...
, and with whom he continues to collaborate, often in interactive projects involving sport, games, or the environment. Another phenomena since 1980 is the violin-playing dynasty known as “The Rosenbergs,” part quasi-biographical appendage and part surrealist satire.
In 2002 he set up the Australia Ad Lib website for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: an interactive guide to the wild, the weird, and the vernacular in Australian music.
Recently Jon Rose realised the bicycle-powered media performance Pursuit in Sydney and Hobart; performed a completely new and improvised solo part for the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov
Ilan Volkov
Ilan Volkov is an orchestral conductor. His father, Alexander Volkov, was a concert pianist of Ukrainian ancestry. His mother, Professor Shulamit Volkov of The School of Historical Studies in Tel Aviv University, is of German ancestry...
; created two radiophonic works for the BBC on the history of the piano and the first Aboriginal string orchestra in 19th century Australia; concertized in Europe with musicians such as Veryan Weston, Johannes Bauer, Thomas Lehn
Thomas Lehn
Thomas Lehn is a German-born piano and synthesizer player active in free improvisation and contemporary music.Lehn has recorded with Marcus Schmickler, Keith Rowe, John Butcher, Phil Minton, Phil Durrant, Radu Malfatti, Axel Dörner, Cor Fuhler, Gerry Hemingway and is a member of the electronic...
, Aleks Kolkowksi, Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist. Best known for his work with English avant-rock group Henry Cow, Cutler was also a member and drummer of a number of other bands, including Art Bears, News from Babel, Pere Ubu and Gong/Mothergong...
, and Hollis Taylor; premiered his interactive multi-media commission “Internal Combustion” for violin and orchestra at The Philharmonic, Berlin; played the USA/Mexico border fence; and was apprehended by the Israeli Defence Forces at the Separation Fence near Ramallah in the Occupied Territories. His latest string trio, Strike, features two young Australian double bass virtuosos: Clayton Thomas and Mike Majowski.
Rose has appeared at numerous music festivals throughout the world, including Strasbourg New Music Festival, New Music America
New Music America
New Music America was an American festival of experimental or Downtown new music.The festival began at The Kitchen in New York City in 1979. In this first year, the festival was actually called New Music New York....
, Moers New Jazz Festival, European Media Festival, The Vienne Festival, Ars Electronica
Ars Electronica
Ars Electronica is an organization based in Linz, Austria, founded in 1979 around a festival for art, technology and society that was part of the International Bruckner Festival. Herbert W. Franke is one of its founders. It became its own festival and a yearly event in 1986. Its director until 1995...
, Northsea Jazz Festival, Dukumenta, Roma-Europa Festival, Festival D'Automne, Festival Musique Actuelle, and the Berlin Jazz Festival. Rose also curates his own festival, String 'Em Up, which focuses on innovative use of stringed instruments. The festival has travelled to Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, Rotterdam
Rotterdam
Rotterdam is the second-largest city in the Netherlands and one of the largest ports in the world. Starting as a dam on the Rotte river, Rotterdam has grown into a major international commercial centre...
, New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, and Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
.
Main Releases
- Forward of Short Leg (Dossier, 1984)
- Vivisection (Auf Ruhr, 1988)
- Paganini's Last Testimony (Konnex, 1989)
- Violin Music for Restaurants: (Feat. the Legendary Jo "Doc" Rosenberg) (Cuneiform, 1992)
- Brain Weather: The Story of the Rosenbergs (ReR, 1993)
- Pulled Muscles (Immigrant, 1993)
- The Virtual Violin (Megaphone, 1993)
- Violin Music for Supermarkets (Megaphone, 1994)
- Eine Violine fur Valentin (No Wave, 1995)
- Perks (Recommended, 1995)
- Violin Music in the Age of Shopping (Intakt, 1995)
- Shopping.Live@Victo (ReR, 1997)
- Techno Mit Störungen (Plag Dich Nicht, 1998)
- Sliding (Noise Asia, 1998)
- The Fence (ReR, 1998)
- China Copy (Creamgardens, 1999)
- The Hyperstring Project (ReR, Meagsonic, 2000)
- The Violin Factory [live] (Heyermears Discorbie, 2001)
- Temperament (Emanem, 2002)
- Great Fences of Australia (Dynamo House, 2002)
- The People's Music (ReR, 2003)
- Artery (NOWnow, 2004)
- "Double Indemnity" (Hermes, 2004)
- "Fleisch" (Saucerlike Records, 2004)
- "Futch" (Jazzwerkstatt, 2006)