Biography
Despite frequent oversight of his broad range, Jon Rose stands out as an uncommonly adaptable violinist. A subversive maverick counted among new music’s most vivid figures, he earns recognition chiefly through experimental radio dramas, conceptual stage works, radically altered string instruments, and sharp comedic timing. Cross-thematic threads run through most of his output, echoing Frank Zappa’s conceptual continuity while offering a thorough revision of violin history. He also remains active as a free improviser within Australian and German ensembles.
Rose spent his childhood in England, taking up the violin at age seven and continuing formal lessons until fifteen, when he abandoned institutional training. Professional work began for him at the start of the 1970s; throughout that decade he accepted any available engagement, moving between rock, country, jazz, and contemporary settings as well as commercial session dates. Exposure to each genre’s standard repertoire supplied the signature phrases and clichés that later informed his John Zorn-like jumps between styles. Midway through the 1970s he relocated to Australia, quickly becoming a driving force in the developing avant-garde community and issuing his earliest recordings on the Fringe Benefit label, later anthologized in 1999 as Fringe Benefits: 1977-1985.
In 1985 Rose settled in Berlin, where his work expanded rapidly. Before departing Australia he had already completed a ninety-minute ABC series titled The Anatomy of the Violin, yet it was in Berlin that he refined his distinctive humor, stylistic juxtapositions, and historical fabrications through a sequence of hörspiels. Violin Music for Restaurants, aired by WDR in 1987, appeared three years later as the first of numerous releases on Chris Cutler’s ReR Megacorp imprint. During the same period he assembled the East Berlin noise-improv quartet Slawterhaus alongside Johannes Bauer, Dietmar Diesner, and Peter Hollinger; the group stayed intermittently active for more than ten years and issued two CDs.
Early in the 1990s Rose began incorporating MIDI interactive electronics. Between 1990 and 1993 he produced the Rosenberg cycle, a trilogy of radio pieces centered on an imagined family of Australian violinists that resulted in two albums, one of them Brain Weather: The Story of the Rosenbergs, together with the book The Pink Violin. The subsequent Shopping cycle, spanning 1994 to 1996, offered a satirical commentary on consumerism through four CDs, the volume Violin Music in the Age of Shopping, and numerous concerts featuring elaborate staging.
By the mid-1990s Rose was again dividing his time between Germany and Australia. He pursued further eccentric undertakings, among them the site-specific Fence series and the badminton-inspired Perks, while returning to purely acoustic free improvisation in the Kryonics and the Exiles. At the turn of the millennium he co-led the nine-piece ensemble Strung.
Rose spent his childhood in England, taking up the violin at age seven and continuing formal lessons until fifteen, when he abandoned institutional training. Professional work began for him at the start of the 1970s; throughout that decade he accepted any available engagement, moving between rock, country, jazz, and contemporary settings as well as commercial session dates. Exposure to each genre’s standard repertoire supplied the signature phrases and clichés that later informed his John Zorn-like jumps between styles. Midway through the 1970s he relocated to Australia, quickly becoming a driving force in the developing avant-garde community and issuing his earliest recordings on the Fringe Benefit label, later anthologized in 1999 as Fringe Benefits: 1977-1985.
In 1985 Rose settled in Berlin, where his work expanded rapidly. Before departing Australia he had already completed a ninety-minute ABC series titled The Anatomy of the Violin, yet it was in Berlin that he refined his distinctive humor, stylistic juxtapositions, and historical fabrications through a sequence of hörspiels. Violin Music for Restaurants, aired by WDR in 1987, appeared three years later as the first of numerous releases on Chris Cutler’s ReR Megacorp imprint. During the same period he assembled the East Berlin noise-improv quartet Slawterhaus alongside Johannes Bauer, Dietmar Diesner, and Peter Hollinger; the group stayed intermittently active for more than ten years and issued two CDs.
Early in the 1990s Rose began incorporating MIDI interactive electronics. Between 1990 and 1993 he produced the Rosenberg cycle, a trilogy of radio pieces centered on an imagined family of Australian violinists that resulted in two albums, one of them Brain Weather: The Story of the Rosenbergs, together with the book The Pink Violin. The subsequent Shopping cycle, spanning 1994 to 1996, offered a satirical commentary on consumerism through four CDs, the volume Violin Music in the Age of Shopping, and numerous concerts featuring elaborate staging.
By the mid-1990s Rose was again dividing his time between Germany and Australia. He pursued further eccentric undertakings, among them the site-specific Fence series and the badminton-inspired Perks, while returning to purely acoustic free improvisation in the Kryonics and the Exiles. At the turn of the millennium he co-led the nine-piece ensemble Strung.
Albums
