Introduction

The following pages survey the musical output of violinist Jon Rose through the prism of his museum dedicated, like himself, to all things violin: the Rosenberg Museum. Museums created around a violinist’s output are rare. Aside from Rose, only Louis Spohr (1784–1859) springs to mind. Founded in 1912 in Kassel, Germany decades after his death, the Spohr Museum closed in 1933 under the Nazis but was re-opened in 1967 by the International Louis Spohr Society. Sharing its current space with a commemoration of the Brothers Grimm, the Spohr Museum focusses on violin-playing in general but incorporates an archive of memorabilia, including chin rests (which he claimed to have invented c1820) (Boyden et al. 1980, 33), concert programs, autographs, newspaper cuttings, and family portraits.¹ In short, the Spohr Museum delivers the predictable. It bears almost no resemblance to the Rosenberg Museum, which is another beast altogether.

The Rosenberg Museum prevails as a nontraditional enquiry into the violin that demands its archive be sung to life by performances, not unlike the Australian Aboriginal practice. Fostering both creative and political acts by its founder and others, it disrupts notions of a museum as a place of institutional reassurance, just as it confounds assumptions of the violin as an emblem of high art. Each of the seven articles assembled for this special issue explores aspects of these themes. As Erkki Veltheim observes, the Rosenberg Museum is ‘a site for radical music praxis’. Although the violin remains fundamental as a ‘floating signifier’, Rose’s activity takes place on a vast experimental canvas. He is fond of challenging the received version of history and setting the musical record right (to his mind), but he does not stop there. He delights in blurring lines in ways that can be confusing but also exhilarating. Here the unpredictable flourishes: the violin as sonic and visual artefact undergoes spirited transformations and intense collisions with politics and culture. Real world instruments, compositions, projects, and research are juxtaposed with the Rosenbergs, an entire family tree of fictional violinists who seem to take over when the practical constraints of physics and a lack of resources might limit what is actually possible in the life of one musician performing new music.

Parallels can be struck with P.D.Q. Bach, the fictional forgotten son of J.S. Bach launched as a parodic persona by composer and musician Peter Schickele in 1965.² He combines slapstick, musicological parody, and humorous re-arrangements of works from Bach and Mozart to Philip Glass and folk tunes. As with Schickele, parody and satire, high and low art, and extreme and sudden violations of expectations dominate the Rosenberg Museum. Although Rose also has an alter ego, Dr Johannes Rosenberg, in this the parallel with P.D.Q. Bach diminishes. In Rose’s oeuvre, the protagonist and central character is less a person than the violin itself. Chez the Rosenberg Museum, ‘violin’ becomes a generic device to include any amount of experimentation with string instruments. In this way, Veltheim notes how the Rosenberg Museum challenges the limited conceit of a museum as ‘an official repository for catalogued, indexed and preserved objects that represent a given community's accepted histories and forms of hegemony’. The disruptions and provocations mount as Veltheim details Rose’s polymath skill box, which includes improvisation, composition, interactive electronics, musicology, instrument building, radiophonic storytelling, and environmental works that allow him to conceptually and physically explore sonic worlds where few others have trod.

Anthony Bond contemplates the iconic nature of the Italian invention, the first image of which turns up in a 1530 painting by Gaudenzio Ferrari entitled Madonna of the Orange Tree, followed a few years later by images in a Saronno church fresco. While the keyboard in its various manifestations may have been the bread and butter of harmonic and polyphonic reasoning that led to the canon of Western music, the violin manifests the look of Hochkultur. And as any taxi driver may tell you, a violin is always an overpriced Strad. Bond recounts how the instrument serves as a display of power (the Cremonese violins are often owned by banks), a passport to sophistication, and a European theme park of aesthetics. He notes that in late Capitalism, the image of the violin has infused the world of advertising, selling everything from insurance and tourism to pornography and health foods. Ironically, the rise of China as a mercantile power has engendered the development and export of its cheap and accessible violins, the absolute contrarian image usually associated with the instrument.

In tracking the violin’s trajectory across both fine art and popular culture, Bond canvasses not just advertising agencies, but also visual artists, designers, and conceptual musicians worldwide. One key influence observable throughout the Rosenberg Museum is Dadaism and its descendants, Surrealism and Fluxus. In Rose’s view, Dada was the most important notion of the twentieth century. In a subsequent section of this issue, ‘Images from the Rosenberg Museum’ further underscores and extends Bond’s account. These images also have an online presence, and apart from content, they are selected for colour, so I recommend viewing them online. Bond also looks beyond images and materials to motion, a recurring theme in Rose’s inventions. This he attributes to Rose’s interest in ‘the inherent properties of sound’ and his propensity to make discoveries ‘out of doing, not just thinking’.

Jane Ulman examines the richness of Rose’s radiophonic oeuvre, highlighting his principle themes combined with the violin: politics, sport, and alternative musical biography. The act of broadcasting is an intimate method of communication and also comparatively cheap, with productions rarely censored. So, for someone like Jon Rose who was intent on mounting major interventions into history—changing, subverting, and/or correcting, radio was an ideal medium. Radio has attracted him since childhood, and over 40 productions have benefited from his wit and satire, his skills as composer, performer, writer, and producer, and, above all, his gift as storyteller (he writes his own texts) and fabulist. And where Rose goes, the violin follows—if not leads. Ulman understands the instrument to be his ‘cultural Geiger counter’.

A trilogy of Rosenberg radiophonic works extends notions of violin by posing ‘existential and psychological questions’, while never preaching. In addition, a set of Rose’s secondary infatuations are never far away from plot or auditory digression: consumerism, colonialism, and Australiana (including indigenous language and cultural practice) made regular appearances on the airwaves. As an ABC producer, Ulman observed Rose at work in many ABC productions and followed his radiophonic career as new histories of music were revealed through his critical ear. She notes that under the comedic mask of sharp wit, savage satire, and out-and-out clowning around, Rose’s work is ‘nothing if not serious’.

Bennett Hogg situates the various musical provocations of Jon Rose within the footing of Western theory and aesthetics. Hogg’s proposition: straight lines are the basis of a certain conformity in music that can be traced back to Greek mythology, and ‘the straight line and the harmonic series originate at the moment the infant Hermes builds the first lyre’. A specialist in music of the landscape, Hogg puts Rose’s various activities under a philosophical lens, asking, are they of line, against line, or sitting on the line? Thinking with Ingold and Eagleton, Hogg locates Rose’s ‘The Great Fences of Australia’ project (with giant stretched strings laying out a veritable primer of the harmonic series even as they draw lines and mark out territories) in the classic nature versus culture binary. Hogg also surveys other intricate and large scale projects by Rose that feature violins on wheels and bicycles for their Klee-like qualities of ‘taking a line for a walk’—although in the Rose scenario, he is drawing a musical line over a landscape, as a bow is drawn over a string. Hogg’s concern here with music as motion in space overlaps with Rose’s self-assigned brief: ‘to test musical notions of time, distance, and speed’. Lines do not simply extend; they act as limiters. Rose tests his limits on the violin (once in 1982 with a twelve-hour, nonstop marathon concert) but also the threshold of what a violin can be as a cultural phenomenon (Uitti 2006, 635). In his analysis of Rose’s improvisation of a solo part for the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, Hogg hears a benign form of trespassing, reaffirming his concern with the spatial and geographical aspects of music.

Although the practice of sport might appear far removed from that of violin playing, in ‘Blowing the Whistle’, Jon Rose argues that live music can be embedded into almost any activity via interactive technologies—or, to put it more succinctly, almost any movement able to be measured can be rendered as music. Throughout his work in this arena, music does not simply accompany and accessorize sporting activity; music becomes instead the direct product of sport. Rose appreciates the many similarities between the practice of music and that of sport, particularly the physicality of both disciplines. He observed in the 1980s and 1990s how the STEIM interactive software that he utilised for his interactive MIDI bow was relevant to play in games of rules, chance, and circumstance in the widest possible applications. This led to one of his most adventurous projects, ‘Perks’, an interactive badminton game that interrogated the Jekyll and Hyde duality of maverick Australian composer Percy Grainger. (As the first to use the term ‘free music’, as a fitness fanatic, and as a sexual transgressor, Grainger was a subject who offered wide appeal to Rose (Dreyfus 1985).) In ‘Perks’, musical structure is fed by the ‘binary and competitive’ nature of the sport of badminton.

In addition to their differences, Grainger and Rose find correspondences: in the last decade of his life, Grainger built (with Burnett Cross) a number of experimental homemade instruments, and he founded his own museum on the grounds of Melbourne University (Dreyfus 1985). Rose’s museum houses many custom-made instruments made by himself or with collaborators. Among the numerous hacked violins are artefacts that push the idea of a musical instrument to extremes. Not all of Rose’s oeuvre survives. After the Canberra Pursuit project in 2013, due to lack of storage space, over 130 bicycle-powered instruments were recycled as junk or repurposed for student use. Three instruments, however, were retained by the Rosenberg Museum.

As a musical collaborator with Rose in recent years, Hollis Taylor writes about his Australia Ad Lib project from the vantage points of backstage and onstage, in the field and at the desk. Upon returning to live in Australia in 2001, Rose posed the question ‘How musical is Australia?’, wondering if the fifth continent had, like so many other countries, drifted from do-it-yourself makers into do-nothing consumers. Australia Ad Lib is his answer. Announced on the ABC website as a portrait of Australia through ‘the weird, the wild, and the vernacular’, the website aimed to provide a survey of contemporary music practice in Australia that went beyond the standard tropes of opera, classical music, and popular entertainment, or even the official avant-garde. Cross-connected with hyperlinks, the website finds Rose sniffing out obscure and underrated musical practices normally hidden under the cultural carpet, like the gumleaf playing of Aboriginal elder Roseina Boston. Rose did not stop with humans. Dinky, the singing dingo, took centre stage on the website, much as he did every night wowing tourists in the back room of a roadhouse in Central Australia.

Rose notes how, apart from being home to the longest continual musical tradition (Aboriginal settlement now estimated at some 65,000+ years) (Davidson & Wahlquist 2017), the country was also home to a neglected but vital colonial musical expression, typically ignored by the ruling elite and only idling in the subconscious of the average citizen. The Ad Lib site made a point of advocating the widest concept of what constitutes contemporary music praxis, heralding marginalised voices and outsiders, and calling out cultural cringe and exclusive institutional theories of music. As such, Ad Lib was a natural extension of Rose’s notion of a museum, returning us full circle to Veltheim’s critique of the received definition of museum (or website) that strives to be no more than ‘an official repository for … accepted histories and forms of hegemony’.

Finally, we encounter the catalogue from ‘The Museum Goes Live’, the 2016 manifestation of the Rosenberg Museum at Carriageworks in Sydney. Typical of a Rose project, the Museum functioned in two states: as an exhibition of violins and violin-like objects, sound installations, and multimedia projections, along with a reading room; and as a performance featuring a string ensemble playing regular and irregular string instruments from the Museum collection. Just as his Museum embraces the unexpected, so too the catalogue. In entries detailing instruments, collections, and projects represented in the Museum, Rose itemizes their provenance, condition, sound, appearance, and performance logistics, to be sure—but he never misses an opportunity to contextualize an instrument or project, drawing on history and anecdote, injecting political judgments and cultural critique, making novel connections, jumping off into flights of fancy, referring to fictional characters, reporting stories from the road (like an incident where he was held and interrogated at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie in 1987 on account of his Nineteen-String Cello), and then veering via a sharp turn to, say, discuss the aesthetics of polystyrene. The catalogue, like the Museum, is a tour through the connect-the-dots mind, process, wit, works, and obsessions of Jon Rose.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. http://travelsfinders.com/spohr-museum.html.

2. https://www.schickele.com/concerts/FiftyYears/index.htm.