SAINT JOHANNA
Radio France 1989
Radio inside a Violin: A gift to Jon Rose by the marketing department of WDR Cologne
  • Produced in 1989 at Le Confort Modern, Poitiers, for Fazette Bordage; edited at Radio France.
  • Text, music, MIDI Keyboard, by Jon Rose.
  • Shelley Hirsch - voice, Peter Hollinger - drums, Jon Rose - violin.
  • Local cast of footballers and crowd by Le Confort Modern.
  • The chronicle of Saint Johanna was sung by boy singers Nicholas Epain and Marc Delors.
  • Les Boyaux Anciens de Poitiers directed by Docteur J. Rosenberg.
  • Later exposed on Radio France by Kaye Mortley (it had been gathering dust).

A tale of two heroines, both with the same name, both play the violin (or Medieval Vielle in the historic case), both sing, both engaged in battle with the English; one is a Joan of Arc archetype from the 14th century and the other is a new wave rock star from the 1980's. The earlier one is probably the most significant, as she references a football match played in 1381... "only used to playing with one ball, the invaders became disorientated when the French started kicking 100s of balls at them, believing the French army to be 22 times as big as it actually was". She seems to have been responsible also for the phrase "The English are coming", used by French women to this day to describe their monthly cycles.

What's New

December 2024
'Jon Rose Archive' - new on Bandcamp with recently recovered recordings from earlier decades, featuring Violin Factory 1999, Great Fences of Australia 2002, Slawterhaus 1992, Temperaments 2009, Hyperstring @ Roulette 2000.
Vienna, Outback Australia, Salzburg, England, New York.
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
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