For Jon Rose, the violin is not a fixed object: it's an atom in a universe of unexplored possibilities. Whether developing his own unique language to play it, or curating masochist marathon concerts that require him to perform non-stop for over twelve hours at dangerously high speeds (to test the effects of fatigue on music), or smashing his violin to pieces over the kitchen table before rebuilding it in countless mutant variations, Jon Rose has probably done more to advance the instrument than anyone in the last several hundred years.

In the 1970s and '80s, he invented a wind-powered violin with sails, a 5-String Trapezoidal Viola amplified through a washing machine powered revolving speaker, an FM Radio Violin that interrupts local radio stations when played, jet propelled collision violins, and The Data Violin played by live data from Wall Street traders (accompanied by a String Quintet performing Pennies From Heaven). By the time I began production with Jon in Australia for "The Reach Of Resonance," he had created an entire chamber orchestra of bicycle powered instruments that performs by riding around the audience in an abandoned Sydney train station.

[For more on Jon Rose's bicycle music, see my interview with Kaffe Matthews: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Music/Kaffe-Matthews/]

Left To Right: Jon Rose's 2-String Pedalboard (For The Under-Utilized Feet Of A Violinist), 19-String Amplified Frame Violin With Stereo Electronics, And Jon Walking The Amplified Feedback Dog

Jon Rose's 19-String Cello (Playable On All Sides)

Wind Powered Violin With Sail, Whirling Violin Performance On The Sydney Airport Runway, 16-String Long Neck Violin With Well Strung Ironing Board, And More

Madonna & Child (Far Right) And More Relative Violins

Jon Rose's Viola-Cyle And Other Bicycle Powered Instruments (Sydney, Australia)

In 1987 Jon introduced the first interactive violin bow into the world, which makes music instantly from the movement of his body, arms, feet and fingers, creating layers of musical counterpoint in real time to accompany his violin playing during performance. In 1998, Jon became the first violinist to manipulate live video through his bow.

Article On Dr. Johannes Rosenberg Published In "The Pink Violin: A Portrait Of An Australian Musical Dynasty"

One of the most bizarre experiences from making “The Reach Of Resonance” was traveling to the remote and unsuspecting Slovakian village of Violin, where Jon founded The Rosenberg Museum to preserve their legacy. I remember watching busloads of schoolchildren arriving at an exhibition on The Rosenbergs in Brno (Czech Repulic) to learn about their seminal contributions to music history and their encyclopedic variety of mutated “violins." The Rosenberg Museum had become such an organic mixture of reality and fiction that even direct participants in this expansive game were unable to discern which was which. This is even true for the local inhabitants of Violin, who have tolerated The Rosenberg Museum only because they mistakenly believe it was established as a memorial for a pilot who crashed in Violin during World War II.

Jon Rose + Rosenberg Scholar Marie Mart Roijackers During Production At The Rosenberg Museum (Slovakia, March 2009)

Marie Mart Roijackers Explores Recent Acquisitions At The Rosenberg Museum

A Rare Rosenberg Sighting Near Broken Hill, Australia + Excerpt From A Legendary Rosenberg Score Presumed To Be Lost

Though the Rosenbergs were conceived as an alternate version of reality, a critic once wrote that they were also the first virtual dynasty to become real. Sure enough, the fictional Rosenbergs began to steer Jon’s actual life in unpredictable directions around the world from wreaking anarchy in shopping malls to making marmalade out of violin cases. The following video on those experiences was shot during our time together in former Czechoslovakia. Though none of it was used in the final cut of "The Reach Of Resonance," it serves as a perfect introduction to Jon's work.

Jon Rose Evoking Music From An Army Camp Fence In Judea And The Old 1967 Border Between Syria And Israel (Golan Heights)

Over time, Jon's relationship with fences turned inward to a reflection of how the mind divides the world into binaries, no matter how arbitrary, and projects them onto the physical world. By transforming the physical material dividing people into a musical material, he began to explore music’s capacity to make people re-imagine the society that history has handed down to them.

This led him to make music from fences around the world, in places as diverse as Cold War Europe, the US / Mexico border, and disputed Israeli / Palestinian territories (to name only a few). Usually the only people attending these concerts were border patrol or militaries chasing Jon down with tear gas, stun grenades and helicopters. But for Jon, this was always a musical discovery, a creative breakthrough. In his mind, it had simply expanded into a composition titled: "Piece For Fence and Helicopter." During our travels together, Jon was actually making plans to play North Korea's DMZ fence...neither of us expected him to survive, but for Jon that was beside the point.

Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor Making Fence Music In The Strezlecki Desert, Australia

As it turns out, the largest objects ever created by human beings are fences in Australia. The dingo fence alone is approximately twice the length of the Great Wall of China. Before that, Australia’s Rabbit Proof Fence was arguably the longest thing of any kind ever made. When considering the gargantuan labor and loss of life required to build such enormous musical instruments, it is a fantastic irony that their engineers had no idea they were constructing them all the way across the only continent whose entire landscape had already been transposed into a musical score. The original custodians of the land believed that nothing existed unless it had a song which could be sung. By knowing the song of every rock, tree and lump of dirt, Aborigines not only possessed a sonic map which allowed them to navigate their way through the unforgiving landscape, but also to experience the spiritual significance of every topographical detail in their path as musical notes scattered by their totemic ancestors.

“In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score,” Bruce Chatwin once wrote. “There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every 'episode' was readable in terms of geology...a featureless stretch of gravel was the musical equivalent of Beethoven’s Opus III.”

Production Photos (Central Australia and Blue Mountains)

Each individual inherited some fragment of the landscape in its musical form, and by adding up the individuals and the music they were entrusted with, you’d have a sonic map of the continent. This was needed not only to navigate through it, but to preserve it: for them, nothing existed unless it was sung into existence, and to stop singing would cause it to disappear. Knowing the music incorrectly could result in the death penalty. It would not only unravel creation, it could cause one to stray off the Dreaming Tracks of their ancestors.

The Western Arrernte People Of Central Australia

One of the most moving memories from these journeys was working with the Western Arrernte aborigines who have formed the Ntaria Ladies Choir in Australia's central desert, near the intersection of the Caterpillar Dreaming and the Honey Ant Dreaming. Their music reflects the collision of their songlines with the hymns of the Lutherans who established missions in this remote part of Australia in the 19th century. So this particular music (and the Western Arrernte language it's sung in) cannot be heard in any other part of the world. The choir was gracious enough to allow me to make numerous audio recordings of their singing, some of which have since been preserved as part of a permanent exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. A brief excerpt can be heard in the following video.

Rod Cooper

Rod Cooper builds complex musical instruments in Melbourne, in which every physical part (often well over 100) can be bowed, plucked or resonated.

Robin Fox Revealing The Underlying Geometry Of Music

Robin Fox has been using lasers and cathode ray oscillators to make the underlying geometry of music visible to listeners as they hear it. His images give us tools to hear differently: even a single sine tone is revealed to be an abstraction from an "immense number of events." The material reality of sound appears as a massive complexity that always transcends human perception...a heightened awareness of the infinitely complex and "vibratory nature of matter."

Steve Elkins & Robin Fox In Mexico City (Left) And Robin's Street Theramin In Melbourne (Right)

Robin has also been writing music specifically for people with cochlear ear implants (so that they can once again enjoy the sound of music without technological distortion), and built a giant theremin in Melbourne to be played by people passing by on the street. To hear it and learn more about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFjr7reLovI

Justice Yeldham Screams Into (And Chews On) Amplified Glass

Justice Yeldham (aka Lucas Abela and DJ Smallcock) screams into amplified glass. Early feats saw him stabbing vinyl with Kruger style stylus gloves, bounding on electro acoustic trampolines, drag racing the pope across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, performing deaf defying duet duels with amplified samurai swords, hosptalised by high powered turntables constructed from sewing machine motors, record chance John Peel sessions with the Flaming Lips, and becoming Otomo Yoshihides' favourite entry into his Ground Zero remix competition 'Consummation' (even though instead of sampling the CD he destroyed it using amplified skewers!).

Justice Yeldham's Vinyl Race Tracks

When I met Justice at a punk club in Sydney, he was beginning to make race tracks out of vinyl records to be played by modified remote control cars with styli attached to their undercarriages.

Justice Yeldham's "Mix Tape"

Justice's musical instrument "Mix Tape" is a sculptural mass of audiotape attached to helium balloons. These balloons are released into the ceiling, leaving the tape to unspool as their cassette anchors them to the floor. This forest of exposed audio-tape then provides the raw material for an interactive mash up as participants run the magnetic strips across a series of exposed playback heads. He has more recently been designing pinball machines that make extreme metal and noise music from game play.

Roseina Boston (Aboriginal Gum Leaf Player), The West Australian Chainsaw Orchestra And Dinky The Singing Dingo

Roseina Boston is a Gumbayungirr elder, the only Aboriginal woman today who still plays the gum leaf. As she told me when I visited her in Australia in 2009, "In the bush when the old people used to go hunting, they'd sit down behind a bush with their spear and boomerang, the old men, and they'd play [the gum leaf]. They'd mimic birds. Then the animals would get inquisitive and look up to see what's making that strange sound, and the old fellas would kill them with their boomerang or spear, and that was their tucker (bush food). That was our culture."

The gumleaf was used by Aborigines in Christian church services by the beginning of the 20th century, and reached popularity in the 1930s when the desperately unemployed formed 20-piece Aboriginal gumleaf bands. Armed with a big Kangaroo skin bass drum, they would march up and down the eastern seaboard – demonstrating a defiance in the face of the whitefella and his economic methodology. The Wallanga Lake Gumleaf Band played for the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932.

Dinky The Singing Dog is probably the most in-demand musician in the Northern Territory, if not Australia. He performs at Stuart's Well Roadhouse, 80 kilometers south of Alice Springs, where every night he jumps on the piano and sings, often accompanying himself by walking up and down the piano.

Ross Bolleter's Ruined Piano Sanctuary (Western Australia)

There were hundreds of thousands of pianos in Australia in the nineteenth century, carried all over the country on the backs of camels. Ross Bolleter is a specialist at playing ruined pianos, which have been trashed by the climate. Through his work we can hear what the continent of Australia has had to say about these bastions of western culture. Ross started the World Association For Ruined Piano Studies (WARPS), which includes a ruined piano sanctuary at Wambyn Olive Farm in Western Australia, where they are collected from all over the country, in various states of entropy, then scattered around the landscape, crumbling out their final days to the tune of gravity and the odd cyclone coming in off the Indian Ocean. Bolleter’s use of history to make new and poignant music is exemplary.

Stelarc

Jon's friend Stelarc has spent half a century extending the capabilities of the human body, at times through merging with machines. He's had a cell-cultivated third ear implanted into his arm, and has allowed his body to be controlled remotely by electronic muscle stimulators connected to the internet. Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson says that Stelarc's physical investigations "sometimes seem to include the possibility of terminality." Jon and Stelarc have strong philosophical differences about whether the human body is "obsolete" and the impact this has on music-making.

Stelarc

But there are other Australians who don’t view their own bodies as such obsolete musical technology. The Tasmanian guitarist Greg Kingston has turned his physical disability of Tourette Syndrome into musical ability, deliberately harnessing the sporadic and explosive short-circuiting in his basal ganglia into an entirely original style packed with such alarmingly speedy energy, humor, sadness, stupidity, and wisdom that it makes him cry (along with the audience).

David Harvey has a severe form of autism in which almost every action, including conducting trees, graves, people, and the city as his own giant musical composition, is, according to Jon Rose, “making sense of his world through music. I’m not suggesting that we all go round conducting trees or traffic, although I’d be the first to sign my name up to such a project, but I find David’s perception of a holistic musical environment much more compelling than the last performance I heard at the Opera House.”

Multiple sclerosis couldn’t stop John Blades from becoming a major figure in Australia’s alternative music scene, and he told Jon that his condition had actually reversed through his involvement with music.

Steve Elkins and Glenn Weyant Turning The US / Mexico Border Wall Into A Musical Instrument For An Audience Of Border Patrol During Production Near Sasabe, Arizona

I could fill a book with the stories I have from my time working with Jon. All this is the bare tip of the iceberg. I haven't even mentioned our experiences turning the US / Mexico border wall into a giant musical instrument, or working with underground organizations to help save migrants dying in the desert.

Nor have I mentioned Jon's surrealist fantasy "Violins In The Outback," a composition that involved creating an artificial Chinese violin factory in the middle of the Australian outback featuring a string orchestra conducted by Mao Zedong's embalmed left arm (in the hands of Jon Rose), which triggered accelerometer-driven samples from its movement (including live samples of the orchestra itself) while a Red Guard factory guide was perched above the orchestra on the sheep chute, saluting the agony and ecstasy of the thousands of violin makers in The People's Republic of China. An audience of over 700 somehow assembled in the middle of the outback to witness this improbable vision.

Steve Elkins and Jon Rose During Production In Australia (Left) and Brno, Czechia (Right)

Documenting Jon building fences for Kronos Quartet to perform at the Sydney Opera House could have been its own film. The following footage shows Jon just before he was arrested simply for playing the violin outside the Sydney Opera House (six months before Kronos Quartet premiered his piece for barbed wire fences there). There are multiple ironies at work here.

Pages From Jon Rose's Notebooks