Someone whose thought process goes something like, “What would this thing sound like if I attached a string to it and bowed it?” is someone after my own heart. That’s what Jon Rose has done for years. He’s a violinist and composer first and foremost, but over the decades he has acquired and created a vast collection of strange and discarded instruments. These instruments make up the Rosenberg Museum, which is documented on an incredible new 4-disc set from Relative Pitch. Thirty-seven tracks of pure experimentation and sonic exploration, an enthralling combination of strange and familiar sounds and timbres. I love that half the time, I have no idea what’s happening on these recordings, yet I can’t stop listening, imagining. It’s a crucial documentation of this living work of art.
Rosenberg Museum officially releases on September 25 from Relative Pitch. And the highest recommendation to spend time exploring Jon’s website, as it’s a treasure trove of sound magic.
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What are some of your earliest memories of sound and music that have stuck with you through the years?
I would have been 5 years old, and I was at a friend’s house playing with his expensive train set. He was older than me and played the violin. I mentioned that I didn’t like the sound of a violin, and so he told me to shut up and ‘listen to this’. ‘This’ turned out to be Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, and it made a life-changing impression on me. It’s the intense sound of bowed strings (the sawtooth waveform), the rhythmic drive, the complexity of counterpoint – like some continually transforming double helix. It’s also the duality at play; it cannot be pulled apart, no winners possible. Many people know the slow movement from this concerto, but that was not the sound that got me; it was this rush of particles. How do I get to play that? How does this music even function? The violin and the duality thing have stayed front and centre to my music ever since.
Later, at school, there was a jazz band with a double bass that nobody was playing, so I decided to give it a try. I knew almost nothing about harmony or how the instrument was supposed to function in a jazz setting. Luckily, the pianist took pity and the time to play me a few bass lines, which I copied by ear. Charlie Parker quickly became a huge influence on me. I was so fascinated by him that I even gave a presentation about him to my classmates. They weren’t particularly interested in the music itself, but they were captivated by the stories involving sex and drugs—much to the disapproval of my teachers. It made me wonder whether I had chosen the wrong instrument.
You started on violin at seven. Do you remember how you felt about it at first? Did it click right away, or did you have to be talked into sticking with it?
Well, I won a scholarship for singing to a choir in a crumbling ancient cathedral (Rochester in the UK), and it was expected that you play an instrument too. It wasn’t a choice I really thought about much. Some say an instrument picks the person.
What pushed you toward the violin specifically? Were your parents musical, or did that come from somewhere else?
My father was a Cockney kid from the East End of London; he sang in a choir from a very young age right up to a few years before he died at the age of 98 – with 3 1/2 years off from his job in Japanese POW camps. He sang there too, and significantly, he tried to make musical instruments out of any materials he could get his hands on; he even tried to make a piano! Apparently, he got two keys and strings to work, then they had to move camp. He bribed the guard with Red Cross cigarettes to tie it onto the underside of the truck they were traveling in, but it fell off – end of piano story. So there might be a genetic link to what I do. My mother loved classical music, but I wouldn’t say she was particularly musical. She had great difficulty in accepting my work when I moved to experimental music.
The Rosenberg Museum first came to mind back in 1976, long before it actually had somewhere to live. What did the project look like in your head in those early years, before there was a building or even much of a collection?
It didn’t really have a look. I just started to collect neglected, unused, or cheap instruments that intrigued me sonically in some way – upright pianos on their way to the trash heap, an impossible-to-tune sitar, a banjo, radios, dilruba (that one, in quite a dilapidated state, came as part payment for giving some music lessons). It’s only after I started playing around with cheap (Mao era) Chinese violins that it occurred to me that I could re-work the violin itself into something more fantastical with more strings and extra necks. By the early 1980s, I was busy with hacking and reworking the violin – the double violin and the aeolian violin (it had a sail attached) survive from then (1982). I hasten to add, I am not a trained luthier by any stretch, and this was more of a sidebar as I earned my living at that time as a professional violinist (particularly in an Italian club, a C&W show, session orchestra, etc. Playing improvised music back then brought in zero income…the situation improved later.
It didn’t find a permanent home until you moved to Central Australia back in 2021. How did all those decades of the museum existing in transit change how you thought about the project itself?
I took some items of the collection to Berlin when I moved there in 1985. As I mention in the CD notes, some of the instruments, including the 19-string violin on a frame, a 19-string cello, a cello with a hurdy-gurdy action, a modified double bass, and a wheel-powered viola, were stolen. At least 3 other home-mades (I know to be sure) were thrown to the trash after I left my loggings in Sydney. In 1991, while playing concerts in Slovakia, I met Jozef Cseres – a professor of aesthetics at Bratislava University. He offered to become the curator of the Rosenberg Museum as it was then known (no salary!)…and that was when, conceptually and practically, the whole thing took off…as there was someone totally committed to running and collecting everything ‘violin’. And it turned out there was a lot of ‘violin’ in Eastern Europe as it switched from socialism to capitalism. He even found a town called ‘Violin’ in Slovakia. It had been owned by a Count Violini who lost it in a card game; later the nearby Danube flooded and pretty well destroyed the place. This is the kind of thing you can’t make up; it’s stranger than fiction (Nb: The word ‘violin’ does not mean violin in Slovak). The place has a small railway station and a football club which briefly became the ‘Rosenberg Museum’.
https://www.jonroseweb.com/archive/g_rosenberg_museum_2009.html
https://www.jonroseweb.com/c_articles_musical_finger.php
I really like the reference to Marx’s “All that’s solid melts into air” line (a favorite of mine) to describe the museum’s condition. I’m curious if that sort of instability feels like a loss to you, or if it’s closer to the actual point of the project?
I used to get upset at being unable to hold onto everything, then I realized that this state of entropy was entirely in keeping with what I had created – which was an extension of the notion of improvisation. A transitory medium.
I also keep thinking about what you said about how a new instrument can only produce new music – sounds that have never existed before. Is that why you keep building? Or is there something else underneath it all that’s harder to name?
I have notebooks which are a clearing house for ideas about music, drawings, designs of instruments, notation, ideas for projects, philosophical brain farts, etc. Like the reason to make any music: it serves a desire to explore, to investigate; it’s the ‘what if’ moments that keep me engaged.
In the vein, you’ve talked about how that exact moment when a string is attached to an unsounded object is magic, and can’t be replicated. Do you remember a specific instrument where that first moment really landed?
The building and experimentation with the 19-string violin on a frame in 1979 – as I added more strings, the instrument kept saying, ‘what about another one here?’
Does the time in which you live, and the materials available to you because of it, feel like a constraint on your work? Or is it simply just the tools and the materials you were handed?
There are always constraints, and constraints lead to expression. With no constraints, there would be no expression, and it is one reason why I keep playing the regular plain vanilla violin – it’s a restraint that keeps you honest.
You’ve spent time thinking about Aboriginal perception, and the idea that there’s no such thing as an inanimate object. How has living in Central Australia, and really sitting with those ideas and that worldview, changed how you hear the objects you’re working with?
Along with getting older, having dealt with some serious health issues, and living in a desert, I’m taking in more and more the transitory nature of all objects, including myself. My worldview hasn’t changed, just become more salient.
https://www.jonroseweb.com/a_jonrose_notebooks_02.php
On these recordings, it’s primarily recorded live with no overdubbing, no effects, and barely any editing. What does that approach to these recordings protect that a more produced approach might lose?
I hope to capture the raw nature and physicality of the instrumental sound. I took some time with each instrument, re-thinking each one, making new modifications, incorporating any new techniques, changing how I set the instrument up, building new additions (eg., the plectrum added to one of the bows on the wheeling violin).
In addition to the instruments, you collect violin stories as well (true, made-up, and in between!). How do you decide which stories belong in the museum?
I accept all stories; there is no censorship. The narratives based in reality are probably the best ones. You probably need to read all 3 books to understand how far that can go. (1. The Pink Violin, 2. Violin Music in the Age of Shopping, 3. Rosenberg 3.0 – not violin music). It’s like you have a concept; the next best thing is to throw the ball to someone else and see how far they can run with it. Without control, the traveler can end up in some surprising places! The collection of violin kitsch is also extensive – the iconography of the violin is used to advertise everything from banking to insurance to tobacco to jewelry to watches to police badges to postage stamps to restaurants to beer to porn.
After building instruments for as long as you have, is there a sound you’re still after for which you haven’t found the right object for yet?
It doesn’t work like that for me. It’s more, here is a found object; what does it sound like with a bowed string attached?
And finally, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
I guess the Great Fences of Australia project never ceases to amaze – there are some examples in the box set – also online.
https://www.jonroseweb.com/f_projects_great_fences.php
If true Memoires float your boat – here are some more:
https://www.jonroseweb.com/a_jonrose_memoires.php
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
