SKELETON IN THE MUSEUM
ABC 2003
Radio inside a Violin: A gift to Jon Rose by the marketing department of WDR Cologne
  • His production was produced privately after ABC management's destruction of The Listening Room in 2003. The composition won the Karl Sczuka Prize at the Donaueschingen Festival 2004.
  • Performed by The Blisters Ensemble - an Australian group that has pioneered the use of interactive, do-it-yourself electronics in live performance, in many respects taking Grainger's imaginative ideas and developing them further. They are Jon Rose, Rainer Linz, Tom Fryer, Joanne and Stuart Favilla. Together they spent several days at the Grainger Museum exploring the archives, unpublished recordings, and instruments.
  • Robert Menzies acted out the voice and thoughts of Grainger
  • Production by Jon Rose

The title refers to composer Percy Grainger's desire to have his skeleton exhibited in his own museum which lies in the grounds of Melbourne University. After his death in 1961, the authorities turned the request down citing reasons of public health and decency.

Percy Grainger was one of the great mavericks of 20th century music, coming up with notions of free music, beatless music and, with the help of Burnett Cross in his home at White Plains New York, inventing machines out of industrial waste that were capable of realising this music -utilising a set of musical aesthetics, such as gliding tones, which have become part of the language of contemporary music. Those budding DJs amongst you might like to know that Grainger was also a pioneer in the use of recording machines as musical instruments - documenting and transcribing (if not transforming) the folk music of Oceania, Scandinavia and Britain onto disc only shortly after the invention of the medium.

Some of the following broadcast contains themes of an adult nature which some listeners may find offensive. There is also the first broadcast of a song by Ella Grainger, Percy's long suffering wife and S&M partner.

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
Latest Stuff
website by jos berkers