The Jon Rose Web - The Long sufferings of Anna Magdalena Bach

Violin Pegs, Rosenberg Museum, Berlin, 1999
Record Playing Violin, Rosenberg Museum, Brno, 2009
Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor play The Fence, Strzelecki Track, 2004
Clock Violins, Rosenberg Museum, Berlin, 1988
The 10 String Double Violin, Sydney, 1982
Rosenberg Museum, Sydney, 2018
The Data Driven Violin, Rosenberg Museum, Berlin, 2015
Interactive Violin Bow Mark 4
Part of the Violin Collection, Rosenberg Museum, 2018
Street Sign from the Town of Violin, Slovakia
12 String Perspex Cello, The Rosenberg Museum, 2018

The Long sufferings of Anna Magdalena Bach

ABC 1998

Radio inside a Violin: A gift to Jon Rose by the marketing department of WDR Cologne

Written and performed by Jon Rose
MIDI programming by Jon Rose
The spoken voice of Anna Magdalena - Lucy Bell
The sung voice of Anna Magdalena - Fatima Miranda
Technical direction - John Jacobs
Production for The ABC Listening Room - Sherre de Lys
This radiophonic work consists of a set of musical and textural variations using the full range of Baroque techniques (inversions, retrograde, retrograde inversions, and fugal forms), and also more contemporary and anachronistic proceedures...including the use of various 'chaotic' algorithms and radical keyboard 'tunings'. Themes of childbirth, death, sex, and the meaning of ‘the random generator’ are interpolated with these virtual keyboards.

In the Forschungsabteilung of the Stadtbibliothek Leipzig, a fragment of notation was found in the early 1990s. This single line of music was quite clearly a 'ground bass' intended for a set of variations.... or indeed improvisations. The line does bare some resemblance to a dance movement from The Anna Magdalena Songbook which Bach wrote for his second wife, the said Anna Magdalena....but this theme is not in the master's hand. Who then was the author? Handwriting experts have ruled out all of Bach's composer sons, so who's left? The mother of course. There is a genetic link in the handwriting according to Dr. Fritz Meinhof of Humboldt University, Berlin. And he is convinced after 2 years of study that the fragment of music does indeed belong to Anna Magdalena. This represents quite an extraordinary historical find and it has sent Bach experts from around the world scurrying to Leipzig for a sneak look at the manuscript.

What's New

October 2024

'A Violin Bow for John Cage' - new interactive works based on a recording lost for over 20 years, featuring an interview with Cage from 1988 on the subject of the violin. On line here.

New York, Alice Springs

November 2024-5

'The Singing Telegraph' - an intervention into the history of the Overland Telegraph which stretched uninvited over the land of the Kaytetye people. Working with the Tara Community, this on going project incorporates ancient, colonial, and modern technologies and languages with new music and multi-media outcomes here

Tara, Northern Territory

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