Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Jon Rose playing his interactive K-Bow at Galapagos Club New York, 2010  
© Jill Steinberg

The Australia Council Don Banks Music Award will be presented tonight to Jon Rose for his outstanding and continued contribution to Australian music. For nearly four decades, Rose has been at the sharp edge of new and improvised music in Australia. He is a violinist, instrument maker, software developer, composer, performer, provocateur and innovator. He has recorded a vast and impressive body of work and has performed and exhibited around the world.

'Jon's influence as a musical maverick and innovator is appreciated worldwide,' says Matthew Hindson, Chair of the Australia Council Music Board, who presents the $60,000 award tonight at the Museum of Western Australia. 'Jon has an uncanny ability to see the musicality of everyday activities, situations and objects. He finds music in everything and encourages us to see that the world is musical.'

Jon Rose started playing violin at the age of seven, but quickly disregarded formal training and has since spent his time exploring everything conceivable, and beyond, that can be done with a violin. His exploration of the violin is captured in his life's work, the Relative Violin Project which, beyond instrument making, has involved writing books, radiophonic works, films, the development of extended string techniques, the founding of a semi-fictional violin museum (the Rosenberg Museum), and a plethora of large-scale multi-media performances often placing the violin outside of the concert hall.

He is well known for playing wire fences, a talent that began with the premise 'instead of this great country of ours being traversed by millions of miles of fencing, it is in fact covered with millions of miles of string instrument, and we all just gotta get out there and play it!'

In 1977, he started Australia's first musician-run collective for the promotion and recording of improvised music, Fringe Benefit. In 2002 he set up the Australia Ad Lib website for the ABC, an interactive record of, and guide to, Australia's diverse music-making. He is also well known for his work with interactive electronics, particularly with his development of the interactive violin bow, or K-Bow. He has turned sports into musical and mixed-media compositions such as netball games (Team Music), pieces for kites and kayaks, a giant environmental ball piece (Sphere of Influence) and developed a whole chamber orchestra of bicycle-powered musical instruments, Pursuit, which will have a revival in Australia in 2013 as part of the Centenary of Canberra celebrations.

AMC resources

Jon Rose - AMC profile
' Jon Rose's Joyous Resistance' - Richard Toop's article on Resonate (21 March 2012)
'Larrikin par excellence' - Martin Wesley-Smith's article on Resonate (21 March 2012)
'The Ball project by Jon Rose' - a blog article on Resonate (31 March 2011)
'Jon Rose in pursuit of music with socio-political intent' - a blog article on Resonate (6 May 2009)
'Team Music, Kite Music and Digger Music' - a blog article on Resonate (17 October 2008)
'Listening to History: some proposals for reclaiming the practice of music' - excerpt from the 2007 Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address by Jon Rose (Resonate 11 December 2007)

Further links

Jon Rose - www.jonroseweb.com
Australia Council - Don Banks Award announcement
Jim Denley talks with Jon Rose - a video interview on RealTime