Jon Rose

MAGAZINE ARTICLE

In the following article, published by Limelight Magazine in September, 2012, I explore the eccentric musicality of Australian avant-garde muusic Maverick, Jon Rose.

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Off the top of my head, I can think of several ways to describe Jon Rose: tireless musical innovator, irreverent larrikin, unapologetic provocateur, maverick, rebel, visionary. All capture the British-born Australian composer’s quirky character from a slightly different angle. I had been warned before I met him that I was to expect a “prickly” personality, and I wasn’t by any means disappointed. Forthright and controversial, during a typical conversation, Rose will jump happily from one banal, accepted truth to another, deconstructing it bit by bit and shattering it mercilessly.

Rose’s eclectic personality and intellectual ravenousness have led to an impressively multifaceted career. “For most of my life I’ve been running five or six careers in parallel,” he tells me, reclining casually into his chair in his Perth hotel room. “Most people who know me as an improvising musician wouldn’t know my work making experimental radiophonic pieces, interactive violin bow pieces, or environmental pieces, or that I write books or have a fake museum.”

The historian Jakob Burkhardt may have been happy to call Rose a uomo universale, or an ‘all-sided man’ – a term he applied to that peculiar kind of fifteenth-century Italian gentleman (Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Battista Alberti, for instance) who distinguished himself for his outstanding intellectual and artistic breadth. “I’m a polymath,” Rose points out quite nonchalantly, without a hint of false modesty. “I’m naturally skilled at a lot of different things. But my early twenties were really confused – I had no idea what to do with all these talents.”

Creative clarity came with his move to Australia from the UK in 1976. “I had to leave that country,” he states forcefully, “otherwise I really was going to go mad. As soon as I arrived here, I knew exactly what I was going to do. Everything became crystal clear. And I am very grateful to this country for that.”

This newfound professional certainty, which struck with an almost Archimedean flash of divine inspiration, came in the form of an idea that would occupy Rose for the next few decades. It was his “Relative Violin” project, a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk on the instrument, involving every conceivable idea with, on and about the violin. 

This quest for new ways of exploring and extending the expressive possibilities of what, after the piano and possibly the guitar, would have to be the West’s most cliché-ridden instrument, has become a lifelong obsession for Rose. It has spawned countless inventions, notable as much for their whimsical names as their creative diversity. These include: “the double-piston, triple-neck wheeling violin”, where the bow is driven by a piston mechanism similar to that of a steam engine; “the 16-string long-neck microtonal violin”, used for the production of tone clusters, and; “the automated violin quartet, AKA the agony and the ecstasy”, a sound installation where the movement of the viewer triggers off light effects and an infernal cacophony of screeching string sounds.

Though “The Relative Violin” may indeed prove to be Rose’s greatest gift to posterity, it is through another, lesser known project I first came to know of him. In a moment of idleness a few months ago, while sitting at my laptop, mindlessly browsing facebook, I saw a youtube clip appear in my newsfeed that immediately sparked my interest. It was about an experimental composer I’d never heard of and bore the title: “Jon Rose: An Aural Map of Australia”.

The opening sequence said it all about Rose’s unconventional spirit. He’s standing in front of the Sydney Opera House, playing his violin. Repeated, abrasive high notes – sounds that, to most, would appear incoherent and unmusical – arouse the hostility of a nearby security officer, who, following the orders of his superiors, promptly asks him to stop playing. Jon, however, is defiant. He motors on with conviction until the piece reaches its “end” (an arbitrary point, considering the performance is an on-the-spot improvisation). When the officer threatens to call back-up to deal with the pesky trouble-maker, Jon’s response is a composed: “you can call whoever you like.”

The episode neatly encapsulates the essence of Jon’s musical life, a life spent on the fringes, at odds with the establishment. In the early days, his unorthodox views and adventurous musical undertakings left the music community in Australia perplexed, and many didn’t know what exactly to make of him. “Most people in the ‘70s and ‘80s in Australia didn’t even recognise what I did as music,” he says, somewhat bemused. ‘Often I found myself playing in galleries because they thought, ‘well if it isn’t music, it must be art.’”

“Did Australia lag behind Europe in this respect?” I ask him, half anticipating how he’d answer. “Definitely,” comes his assured reply. “That’s why I moved to Berlin. They could see I was a serious avant-garde musician there and I was naturally attracted to a place where people would think I was worth something – funny that!”

I see Jon’s musical trajectory echoed in the lives of other Australian composers throughout the twentieth century, who felt a similar urge to seek professional fulfilment elsewhere: Percy Grainger and Margaret Sutherland in the UK, Peggy Glanville-Hicks in the US. Many who returned, having revelled in artistic effervescence abroad, were often greeted by a certain unsavoury suspicion of contemporary music back at home and, as a result, felt stifled by constraints on their creative freedom.

Two minutes into the youtube clip, I am sold on Rose irreversibly. He introduces a series of outlandish, yet curiously intriguing performing musicians he’s discovered over the last years. He begins with Roseina Boston, a Gumbayungirr elder from the Nambucca Valley, NSW, who plays gumleaves with her husband, using them to play tunes and imitate bird calls. He moves onto Ross Bolleter, the pianist who specialises in playing ruined and discarded pianos. Then there’s a Perth-based mechanic who makes music from dropping spanners, followed by Luca Abela, who screams into amplified glass, Leslie Clarke, who clicks tunes with his fingers, Michael A. Greene, who can hum a tune at the same time as he whistles another, and Dinky the singing dingo.

You might be wondering why exactly a musician of Rose’s talent and experience would be so interested in what, at best, seem like quaint and cutesy musical acts you might find in a circus or variety show, but these obscure musical oddities lie at the heart of his philosophical vision. While they may leave the average Australian indifferent and perhaps slightly dumbfounded, they are to Jon Rose irrefutable signs of a vast and ignored reservoir of Australian cultural richness; little-known gems that lie in the dark and remote recesses of our continent and have important lessons to impart about music, its role in our lives and its historical significance in this country.

“We are surrounded by Musak nowadays,” Jon laments, referring to sounds emanating from the environment – musical or non – that no one present is directly responsible for. “But no one is making this music. It’s just on automatic, on playback. It’s so pervasive that no one has to seize the initiative to produce it, so it’s become worthless. It’s time to reclaim our responsibility to make music.”

This is where Roseina Boston and company come in. According to Rose, they are among the few surviving representatives of a critically endangered Australian tradition of do-it-yourself music that hails back to the days of Music Hall and Vaudeville, and is now threatened by, on the one hand, instantaneous playback technologies like the i-pod and the radio and, on the other, the tendency in classical music to see the composer as the supreme musical legislator and the score he produces as his ultimate and infallible word.

“We don’t see the acoustic resources around us,” he insists. Then, indicating a writing desk next to him, he points out, “If we put this on the stage of the Sydney Opera house, we could make music with it.’ As he says this, he’s sliding a draw in and out with one hand, while slapping the desktop with the other, creating a simple but effective rhythmic beat.

In this respect, his views align with those of George Maciunas and his 1960s band of anti-art rebels Fluxus, who believed even the average Joe could make art and use just about any everyday object – from a wooden spoon to a toilet brush – to do it. But, unlike Maciunas, who held bourgeois hypocrisy, capitalism and élitism responsible for the corruption of art and its alienation from the masses, Rose blames aesthetics, history, scientific progress and simple laziness.

In 1983, Rose and his partner, violinist, composer and ornithologist Hollis Talyor set out on a trans-continental voyage. Over the course of many years, they would criss-cross the country many times, covering over 40,000km in total. Their aim was to find fences, located oftentimes in the remotest corners of the country, and play them with their violin bows in an attempt to create a sound map of the country and its people. The project came to be known as “The Great Fences of Australia.”

It was through “The Great Fences” that Rose stumbled upon these hidden musical treasures – mostly by chance. Take his fortuitous encounter with the auctioneer John Traeger, whose vocal style Jon has dubbed “Australia’s very own brand of Sprechgesang”:  “They’d put up a new fence around a graveyard in this ghost town in North West NSW and had invited Hollis and me to play it. After a day of playing, we went to bed but I was woken up by loud noises coming from the bar next-door. I went in and there was John Traeger going for it hell-for-leather.”

In 2005, Rose gathered a selection of his wacky new acquaintances together to perform in a concert for the 2005 Melbourne festival. He called it “Pannikin” and in the program notes, he wrote: “This show you are about to witness celebrates two main aural traditions. One is aboriginal, arguably the oldest ongoing musical tradition we have as a species…; the other derives its content from the do-it-yourself nature of music practised throughout the last 200-plus years of white settlement.” He was determined to bring these unique voices out of obscurity.

As I sit and write, I wonder to myself: if these musicians are indeed as extraordinary as Rose claims, why aren’t they better known or more appreciated in this country? I never asked Rose this precise question, but I can guess what his answer might have been – that most Australian of handicaps: the cultural cringe.

Rose condemns the cultural cringe in no uncertain terms. “Australia’s a frustrating place,” he chides. “It’s a disaster, culturally. [We’re] unable to believe anything good ever happens here - it’s all happening somewhere else and we have to import it.” This chronic lack of cultural self-confidence has two equally damaging effects: it prevents us from according home-grown artistic talent its due value (unless it is first validated overseas) and undermines our attempts to develop anything uniquely expressive of our identity.

In other parts of the world, especially those colonised by European powers, contact between two or more cultures in the last hundred or so years has sparked a plethora of new and exciting modes of musical expression: Raï in the Maghreb, Jazz in the US, and Reggae and Calypso in Jamaica, to name a few. Australia is also an ex-European colony, yet where is our contribution to this flourishing of multicultural music genres?

Rose argues we haven’t been short of opportunities, we just haven’t made the most of them. “I met a ladies’ choir in Hermannsberg in the Northern Territory, who sing Lutheran chorales in Arrente. They have their own, uniquely melismatic sound and articulation. So why hasn’t this become a major form in the world?” He asks provocatively. “It’s an extraordinary cross-pollinisation of cultures that could have led somewhere, but we failed.”

2012 is a big year for Rose. It began with the Australia Council Don Banks Music Award in March, and continued with a string of concert gigs in Berlin, where he’s currently residing. This month, he will tour with “Sound Circus”, taking experimental music to remote areas of NSW, Queensland and South Australia, and witness the première in Perth of a new composition commissioned by new music ensemble Decibel in honour of his 60th birthday.

So it seems recognition may have come at last to this roguish musical adventurer. This country, which he finds so alluring and unnerving, which both inspires and confounds him, may have finally caught up with him. Yet I have the feeling Rose won’t give up the role of cultural muckraker any time soon. He will go on exposing unfounded truths and unnecessary ideological burdens as long as he has the energy for it. “I just speak out against nonsense,” he says plainly to me, when I ask him if he considers himself anti-establishment. “It’s my job.”

But it’s more than a job for Jon Rose, I would say. It’s who he is.