Rosenberg - A Reconstruction
WDR 1990
Radio inside a Violin: A gift to Jon Rose by the marketing department of WDR Cologne
  • The first of a trilogy of 'Rosenberg' radiophonic works by Jon Rose, the others in the series being 'Play It Again, Doc' and 'Brain Weather'.
  • All text, music, non-studio recording, and MIDI programming by Jon Rose.
  • Produced in the studios of West Deutsche Rundfunk for Klaus Schöning and his Studio Akustische Kunst.
  • In Cologne, we had literally dozens of actors and extras involved in this production, including some Italian football fans from the local pizzaria, but I can't find the list anywhere! My apologies.
  • There was a German, an English, and a French version of this piece. I have made a selection from each in this extract.

The key to the structure of The Rosenberg Violin Concerto is to be found on line 9 in the Berlin subway system - The Relative Unified Music Theory. An entire orchestra is crammed into one of the trains as the full scope of the audio score is revealed. Rosenbergian concepts are demonstrated in an Italian Football match, a famous racehorse, multi lingual search programmes, East German and Russian 'number’ station broadcasts to their spies in the West, the notorious BACH motive, a Laplander in mid orgasm, indeed a song that lapses into Esperanto, a monkey's fart, an industrial pneumatic hammer, the weekend factor, dozens of desperate illegal immigrants that the authorities would rather remove, and not forgetting the explosive version of Beethoven's violin concerto recorded as the Berlin Wall sadly fell. As the text points out "In his youth Rosenberg was attracted by the Epimenidies Paradox... he went on to consider a violin language in which the violin could pronounce 'this is not a violin'."

What's New

April 2023
'Rock/Paper/Scissors' - first performance of a radical new interface between violin improvisation, composition, orchestra, and conductor. Highlights here.
KNM, Berlin
March 2023
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Adelaide Festival
March 2024
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The Adelaide Festival
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