Biography

Born 1951, England.

Lives in Australia and Germany. He started playing the Violin at 7 years old. Throughout the 1970's, first in England then in Australia, he played, composed and studied in a large variety of music genres - from sitar playing to country & western; from 'new music' composition to Sound Installations. He became the central figure in the development of Free Improvisation in Australia. In 1986, he moved to Berlin in order to more fully realise his on-going project (of some 20 years) "The Relative Violin". This is the development of a Total Artform based around the one instrument. Necessary to this concept has been innovation in the fields of new instrument design (over 25 deconstructed violin instruments including the legendary double piston, triple neck, wheeling violin and giant bowed instruments reaching up to 15 meters in length), environmental performance, new instrumental techniques, both analogue and the more recently inter-active electronics ... plus using the mediums of radio, live-performance-film and television to create a new, alternative and personal revised history for THE VIOLIN. Jon Rose performs his group projects and solo music in upwards of 50 concerts every year. He is currently performing "The Chaotic Violin", one of a number of highly acclaimed works for violin and inter-active software.

Quotes

Jon Rose
Improvisation. Sport & Evolution

"Humanity’s collective brain seems to remain fundamentally flawed, combative (it takes two to Tango) and tribal (which one do you belong to) in its response to just about every issue from politics to music. Whether it is the expression of racial prejudice, the notion of the Nation State, Football supporters, a religion, or some other exclusive club, we demand that our species be exotic but go to extinction in an orgy of tribal nonsense. We are stuck with our genetic code. And if our branch on evolution’s Tree of Life is now full grown with future development possible but unlikely, clearly we are going to need a sense of humour as the game stumbles on into the next millenium. "Each person must have some subject that fires him to madness, to put up with less seems crazy" (Percy Grainger)."