Talking Back to Media
ABC 6/2/2010
Radio inside a Violin: A gift to Jon Rose by the marketing department of WDR Cologne
  • Produced by New Music Up Late, ABC FM; a sonic collision between a galaxy of local improvising musicians and live feeds of media in all its manifestations.
  • Chris Abrahams - piano: Amanda Stewart - poetry: Peter Farrar - prepared saxophone: Carolyn Johns - sousaphone: James Waples - percussion: Mike Majkowski - double bass, voice: Martin Ng - media accessing and mixing: Erkki Velteim - violin: James Rushford - viola: Judith Hamann - cello: Clayton Thomas - double bass: Jon Rose - violin, conductor, media mixing.
  • Talking Back double bassist Mike Majkowsky has demonstrated an extra talent - he can actually repeat any sentence phonetically backwards!
  • Production for the ABC: Stephen Adams, Julian Day, Andre Shrimski, Christian Huff-Johnston.
  • 'Talking Back To Media' is dedicated to Jean Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) - the first documented conductor of music containing improvised components and who's enthusiasm brought about his demise - hitting his foot with his beating stick causing gangrene and death.
  • This extract comes from halfway through the live broadcast at the ABC Studios, Ultimo, Sydney.

'Talking Back To Media' utilizes the tradition of talk back radio. In this project however, the talking back is articulated by ten improvising musicians, a poet and a sound artist. The ensemble, conducted by Jon Rose, comments in real time on all or any available media - the digital deluge. By trusting the moment, 'Talking Back to Media' reveals a complex train of text, music and sound onto which the listener can jump, allowing our cognitive desire for a story to build a wild group narrative that an individual mind would be unlikely to create. Even the names of the horses called in a race commentary can generate a contemporary socio-political drama or an existentialist meditation. Initially as technology that could not be recorded, radio was only available as a live experience. The speed and execution of new technologies enable us to live again in that dangerous realm.

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
'Beak' - Kronos Quartet plays the world premiere, a composition based on the song of a Pied Butcherbird by Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor.
Adelaide Festival
March 2024
'Night Songs' celebrates an interspecies multi-media engagement between the ancient music of a uniquely Australian songbird - Cracticus nigrogularis (the Pied Butcherbird) and Australia's premiere new music group Ensemble Offspring. Documentation here.
The Adelaide Festival
Latest Stuff
website by jos berkers